Author: president

When I got married in 1969, the idea was to have a year doing something interesting before settling down to kids and suburbia in Sydney. A shipmate from Jardines was Master of a coaster...

I’ve been waiting, bored and restless, since 8 am at the remote Simbai airstrip for a plane to take me back to Mt Hagen. It is now late afternoon. There’s not a lot to...

Back in the early 1960s, when I returned to Lae in a marketing capacity, I was visiting Goroka and naturally my first call was to again meet Denis Buchanan who had taken over Territory...

Toward the end of 1969, beginning a new tour of duty, I found myself at Wewak on the mainland of Papua New Guinea, again flying a two passenger Bell G3B1 turbo charged machine. This...

1953: Auster on take-off crashed into Vanimo Harbour. The pilot was killed and passengers District Commissioner Ian Skinner and Assistant District Officer George Wearne were rescued from the submerged aircraft. 1955: Dragon on take-off...

As related by Julia Lesley Cleland Our second daughter Kathryn was born at home at Balimo in the remote Western District of PNG on my birthday, 8 February 1959. I had planned to go...

Following a telephone approach by a retired senior air safety journalist, the author was prompted to come forward and share this remarkable tale of survival in an aviation incident that occurred in the pre-independence...

In early 1957 I did a patrol of many of the villages in the Palei/Maimai region of Lumi Sub-District in the Sepik District. In early February I met up with ADO Frank Jones near...

In 1955, I had just returned to Sydney from a trans-Tasman crossing to New Zealand in Kylie, a steel ketch which had taken up the previous two years of my young life as we...

During the 1980s I worked in Papua New Guinea for Talair, one of the largest third-level airlines in the world, with a mixed fleet of 55 aircraft flying a complex network of scheduled and...