Goony Bird was a name given to the large and apparently goofy Albatross by American servicemen on Medway Island in WWII.  The name became attached, again by US servicemen, to the DC3. This was a type of aircraft which first flew in 1935 – the year I was born. In its guise as the C-47 Skytrain by the Americans or the Dakota by the R.A.F it carted freight and passengers about during WWII. DC3s were still carrying freight and passengers around when I was living in Libya and later in Papua New Guinea. 

For a while I caught the regular DC3 flight from Benghazi to Marsa Brega on Friday mornings and back to Benghazi on Friday evenings. Approaching Benghazi in a DC3 of an evening you would see the whole city below you as the aircraft made a tight turn to line up with the airstrip.  The white salt pans stood out as did the inner lake where the flamingos fed, and the mosquitoes bred and sent squadrons of their kind at night to disturb our sleep. You could see the floating crane moored by the sailing club in the harbour and my bitumen pipeline on the big breakwater. The Cornice stretched its way from the British embassy to the dock gates and in the old Italian town, the cathedral and the venerable Berenice Hotel remained behind after the Italians had long departed.

The ‘Goony Bird’ was recruited into service by civil airlines across the world. Sometime in the 1960’s I had been a burden on the hospitality of East African Airways in Nairobi who were not paying me quickly enough. I suspect they booked me on a day safari to the Serengeti so that they could get a little rest. It may have been the reason I joined a group of tourists heading for Tanganika in a DC3.

We disembarked by a Landrover and a lorry somewhere in the great expanse of the Serengeti’s grassland, and I joined the queue of my fellow passengers filing past a gentleman with whom we all shook hands. The man was Louis B Leakey the paleoanthropologist who needed the money from we tourists to finance his work in the Olduvai Gorge and to help support the notable research by Jane Goody, Birutė Mary Galdikas and Dian Fossey on primate behaviour.

A few years later the Goony Bird played a part in my short career in Papua New Guinea. It flew freight and passengers where roads were impossible and airstrips short.

My wife, our daughter and I thumbed a lift on a DC3 loaded with building supplies from Lae to Mount Hagen.  There were only two seats, so our daughter sat on a pile of ‘fibro’. The airport for Mt Hagen – Kagamunga – is at an altitude of 5,400 ft. To get from Lae to Mount Hagen the Goony Bird gained height to top the Owen Stanley range. As it did so we saw the cloud waterfall rolling off the mountain. I believe this phenomenon is known as orthographic clouds.

Later in New Guinea I thought I had hired a DC3 to take tourists on a day trip from Lae to Woodlark, one of the Trobriand Islands some way off the east coast of New Guinea. The DC3 failed to show, and the tourists were less than pleased and clamoured as only angry Australians can for a refund.

If you are a student of sociology, you may well have come across Bronislaw Malinowski the founding father, so it is said, of anthropology. He lived as what is called a participant-observer in the Trobriand Islands when WWI was raging in Europe. He developed the notion that the main function of religion was to help individuals and society deal with the emotional stresses which occur during life crises. More relevant to my frustrated prospective tourists in Lae, he also made some interesting observations about the sex lives of Trobriand Island ladies.

After a long life and many mistakes, the failure of the DC3 to turn up at Lae recurs in my memory at inconvenient times. Especially at dawn in England’s deep midwinter.

FLYING HOME TO BERKA II IN A GOONEY BIRD

Sometimes the oil company let me fly in the DC3s they hired to carry people between the old WWII airfield near Benghazi to and from the airstrip near their oil terminal at Marsa Brega on the southern shore of the Gulf of Sirte. I would go there to meet British expatriate workers who wanted to fly to UK and back by East African Airways for their regular home leave.

We would do our days’ work around the oil terminal and make the trip home in the old veteran aircraft in the late afternoon. It could be hot, and the humidity could climb to make you sweat so fine dust would stick to you.

To make his approach to the old potholed airstrip the captain would make a steep turn over Benghazi city. You could look down from your seat and watch the wing tip pointing at the city and the flat calm sea. Sharply in focus for a while were the white salt pans, the huddled old city, the cathedral dome, and the flat calm harbour with the ramshackle floating crane tied up near the sailing club. The silted inner harbour always had a small flock of pink flamingos feeding in shallows.

I think I have seen a Lakatoi. A Lakatoi is a multihulled sailing raft powered by a Pacific crab clawed sails. Memory is difficult and you lose confidence in it, especially if you think you have seen something truly rare. False Memory Syndrome is not uncommon.

The one which is now vivid in my mind’s eye was sailing across the bay before the town of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. It was not one of the big Lakatois that sailed before the prevailing south east trade wind called the Laurabada from Hanuabada, the stilt village of the Motu people, westwards along the Papuan cost until they reached the villages near the Fly River estuary to trade clay pots for sago. These were great multi hulled rafts with two Pacific crab claw sails and many crewmen who formed a trading cooperative. The crews would stay a while, add more canoes to the raft and load up with dried sago. When the prevailing wind changed to the Lahara they ran their loaded Lakatois before it back to Hanuabada. Why did they do this? Because Hanuabada village, and nearby Port Moresby, lies in a rain shadow and sago palms and the big trees to make canoes will not grow there. There was a shortage of carbohydrate but the Hanuabada woman were skilled at making clay pots. There were plenty of sago palms and big trees to make canoes along the coast near the Fly river estuary complex. The Laurabada blew the pot laden Lakatois westwards and the Lahara blew them back again loaded with sago and bigger by a few canoes.  It is what anthropologists, who love the story, call the Hiri trade cycle.

My Lakatoi was just a small one which looked like a raft with a hut on it and the great crab claw sail rising above it. The raft was made of wooden canoes lashed together and the sail of coconut matting. They must have been a hell of a job to sail. Long ago the Hiri trade was stopped because of the number of lives lost trying to sail the great Lakatois heavily loaded with sago.

The one I saw was heading in the direction of the other stilted village to the east of Port Moresby called Koki village. There is a painting of Koki village that June bought in the Top Pub in Port Moresby hanging on the wall in my home now.

I think it was a complaint that Mrs Steinbeck was making when she spoke to me. We were standing on the pavement outside my offices in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, from whence I had been summoned by her tour guide. Mr Steinbeck had delegated his wife to reprimand me whilst he remained in the back seat of his limousine. I think it was sometime in 1967.

The eminent author and his wife had been staying in Lae on the northern coast of New Guinea and had hired my travel company to guide them around its hinterland. The lady who ran the local office undertook the task. She had telephoned to warn me that the Steinbecks would be seeking me out to express their considerable dissatisfaction with her efforts. She, like many Australians, was not notably deferential when addressing important folk. It might have improved her attitude towards them had they not insisted he was John Steinbeck’s brother.

I believe Mr and Mrs Steinbeck had hoped for a period of rest and reflection in Papua New Guinea following a visit to the ill-fated war in Vietnam. He was said to have betrayed his principles by writing favourable reports about US engagement in the region. His wife was later to suggest that his experience in the war zone had led to a change of mind. He may have begun to question both its legitimacy and its execution whilst he was in Papua New Guinea.

The lady from Lae told me that Mr. Steinbeck had been very angry with her whilst she was driving him and the third Mrs Steinbeck to see the remains of the abandoned gold fields at Bulolo, some two and a half hours by road out of town. She told me that Mr Steinbeck had complained about back pain. The road from Lae to the gold fields was very rough indeed in those days and the off-road performance of contemporary motor vehicles was poor. He would have been shaken about somewhat. It is not surprising that he complained. Later, whilst in Japan on his way home, he was found to have two or three collapsed vertebrae. He underwent an operation in the USA to relive the paralysing pain this unfortunate condition causes.  He died in December 1968 of heart disease exacerbated by heavy smoking.

I had not trained my Lae branch manager well enough in the business of tour guiding. She was a feisty lady who was prone to make dismissive remarks about native Papua New Guineans. Her attitude would have upset Mr Steinbeck who may have found parallels in the events in his own country where Martin Luther King was at the height of his powers. He may also have reflected on the sad history of Native Americans. To be fair, it took both Canada and New Zealand a long time to legislate for, and begin to effect, a more enlightened policy towards Native Canadians and Maoris. Such polices need concerted and determined action by governments. This was a not a benefit available to Native Papua New Guineans at the time.

The gold fields at Bulolo had played an important role in the relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea though the wealth they generated was of little benefit to the latter.  They were also notable because in the 1930s, in the absence of roads, eight 3,000-ton aero-portable gold dredges were flown into them from the port of Lae in one of the first major air lift operations in history.

The tourist industry was in its adolescence when the Steinbecks visited Papua New Guinea. The commercialisation of sacred ritual and custom was one of the dilemmas it faced then and still faces now. It is exemplified in the vicinity of Bulolo by the Anga tribe’s custom of preserving the corpses of their dead by smoking them slowly and ceremonially in a Spirit House. The dried human remains were smeared in red mud and left sitting on bamboo platforms on the mountain side overlooking their native villages. At least one of the sacred sites where some of these fragile remains are to be found is now included in tour itineraries. I believe the custom of smoke curing ceremonies has been resurrected recently. Christian missionaries had attempted to stop it in the early years of the twentieth century by offering the Anga supplies of salt with which to cure the corpses. They may have reasoned that it would reduce the ritual which attended the smoking method. 

By the time I was summoned to speak to them the Steinbecks were spending a few days in Port Moresby before flying home to the USA, probably via Hong Kong and Japan. I do not recall much of the conversation with Mrs Steinbeck. I do remember the famous Noble Laurate glowering at me from the back seat of a limousine.

I was in the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Fiji for a good while. I had been severely injured in an accident and, I am told, near death at one time. I survived the immediate trauma and embarked on the long business of mending my body in what was called the Male Paying Ward because we who occupied it could afford the modest fees for our operations and care. The Fijian nurses set about mending my mind with unfailing humour. 

My fellow patients came and went, some I fear to their respective heaven or hell depending on their religious preference. In which case the smiling nurses would cut the toenails of the corpses because they continue to grow a while. Sometimes relatives argued across the remains of their late kinsmen about unresolved family matters.

It was inevitable that we patients should talk about death in the circumstances. One of my Fijian neighbours in the ward had an interesting slant on the subject. He was from the island of Bega (pronounced Benga) where members of some families occasionally displayed their immunity to burns by psyching themselves up and dancing on very hot stones. Sadly, some canny folk realised that this might be a profitable tourist attraction so watching the Fire Walkers of Bega found its way onto ‘bucket lists’ along with swimming with dolphins and watching the wildebeest migration on the Serengeti.

My ward neighbour had walked barefooted for most of his life. When he was confined to a hospital bed for a long time the thick skin on his feet began to crack into deep and painful fissures. The famous Bega Fire Walkers may benefit from the extensive callouses on their feet.

He told me the story of the serpent god who lived in a cave in the Nakavada mountains in the interior of Viti Levu, the largest of Fiji’s numerous islands. When you die, he said, your soul journeys into the afterlife via the serpent’s cave where the scaly deity decides if it goes to heaven or hell.  He was unable to tell me the criteria the serpent applied when making its decisions. Some modern religions offer more help in this regard by guaranteeing exclusive access to eternal paradise in return for obedience on earth.

My office door in Benghazi was propped open by a good-sized piece of petrified wood. It got there because of a strange event concerning an aircraft which was stranded on the ground a good way south of Benghazi. I can’t recall why it had been there in the first place.  Another aircraft had gone to collect the pilot and had also got stuck in the rough terrain when attempting to take-off. Both aircraft were abandoned and subject to an insurance claim.

An Englishman who ran an engineering company in Benghazi wanted to salvage the aircraft and sell off the parts. He needed to see if it was possible to do so profitably. He owned and flew an Auster, a type of light aircraft previously used by the British Army as a spotter or reconnaissance plane. It was designed with excellent short take-off and landing characteristics. He decided to fly over the abandoned aircraft and scout a route which his trucks might take to reach them. He took me with him as I had played a small part in his negotiations with the insurance companies. They would be relieved of some of the costs if he purchased the aircraft for scrap.

We had been flying around for a while when he experienced an embarrassing bladder problem, so he landed the aircraft and got out to urinate. He did not stop the Auster’s engine and thus risk restarting it – a task which would have required me to turn the propeller by hand whilst he sat inside pressing switches and shouting orders in the hope that the engine fired. The propeller would then have spun very quickly, and I might well have lost a hand. I was not in favour of that option. He left the propeller turning whilst I too got out and held on to a wing strut to stop the Auster from joining the other two aircraft.

Some weeks later a member of his staff brought the piece of petrified wood which he dumped on my office floor and left without a word. It made a good door stop. There are petrified forests in the Libyan Desert. Perhaps that was why it was known in antiquity as the homeland of the Greek goddess Medusa whose very glance turned people to stone.

He came from New Mexico and said that he was part Native American. His features bore this out as he had a touch of Aztec about his eyes. He wore cowboy boots, jeans and a sweatshirt most of the time and often a Stetson hat. It was said that he only had one pair of boots and when they were in for repair he would take to his bed. He was, at the time, unmarried and he lived as he pleased.

He had first come to Libya with one of the America oil drilling companies as a tool pusher or rough neck or the like. It was said that he was the best Kelly drillers around. He had drifted from job to job and ended up in Benghazi running a company drilling for water out where the wildcatting oil rigs set up in the desert.  

He said he had been a bomb aimer with the United Sates Army Air Force during the war against the Nazis. That may have been so. At least he wore his leather flying jacket when it was cold, and it had the right look about it. In a town where there were people left over from both sides in that war the story was not unusual and excited little interest.

As his water drilling company grew, he employed more Americans to help him. He sent to the USA for his mother and her current husband, and they set up house amongst us and entertained friends for meals. She was a good cook and the family talked well at the table about their life in New Mexico. Stories of marital disputes settled with guns were not unusual in their repertoire.

They would show their family photographs around after supper. One was of a large group dressed up for a wedding or a funeral. It was the last family picture with aunt so and so they would say. They would point out the aunt and add that she was dead before they could get the photographer out to take the picture. They had dressed her up in her best frock and an uncle held her corps up from behind as the family stood in a row before the camera.