by Jim Eames
Now came the task of finding a ‘friendly’ Beijing post office willing to wind back their post stamp and complete the cycle. It was Mr Wu who, armed with a ‘reasonable payment’, finally found an amenable postal official and the task was completed.
Entertainment in China also carried its own risk, primarily the requirement to consume a clear 80–120 proof sorghum-based spirit known as Baijiu. With a Chinese tradition of requiring any guest to toast with three glasses, it could present a lethal combination. ‘You could think of it as mix of cigarette lighter fluid, aviation fuel—pure dynamite.’
Miller served eighteen months in China before going on to a posting in Singapore but the two men who replaced him, Rod Plaister and Ron Willard, found themselves in Beijing at one of the most significant moments of the twentieth century—the Tiananmen Square student riots in June 1989.
When Plaister arrived in Beijing to take over from Willard, student unrest had been apparent for some weeks but it seemed, to Willard at least, that things were settling down. Then, one evening, while they were driving a young Chinese couple home from an airline party, one of the pair quietly remarked: ‘We think something is going to happen.’ It was to be a prescient comment.
The following day, a Saturday, around lunchtime, Plaister and Willard were heading home from a function when they heard several ‘popping’ sounds in the distance. A little further on, passing Tiananmen Square, they were turned back by a soldier. Not overly concerned, Willard, who was due to return home in a day or so, set off to do some last-minute shopping, only to return to the residents’ compound to be told that convoys of trucks had been positioned close into the centre of the city.
Soon after that rumours reached them that tanks were also positioning and suddenly they were glued to CNN on their television screens. In the following hours the drama that would become known as the ‘June Fourth Incident’ unfolded in flickering images as tanks and thousands of armed troops cracked down on protesters in the vicinity of Tiananmen Square.
But as far as both men could judge, the remainder of the city remained unaffected and, while emphasising he never at any stage felt threatened, Willard recalls a feeling of ‘deserting’ his comrades as he made his scheduled departure on that day’s Qantas service. Within days, Plaister too would be out, along with other expatriates, on a special Qantas flight organised by the Australian embassy to lift them to safety.
Plaister recalls returning to Beijing several weeks later where it appeared as if nothing had happened and the rest of his stay there was without incident. Both would later ponder at the ability of the China to absorb such a traumatic event in which, according to some reports, thousands had been killed.
***
Of course not all posting hazards were politically related. Sometimes the weather played a part.
Peter Snelling had been posted to New York and hadn’t long moved from temporary hotel accommodation and into a rented house in early February 1969 when the worst snowstorm in New York’s history dumped 38 centimetres of snow on the city, bringing it to a standstill. It would be the only snowstorm ever to close John F. Kennedy airport. Fourteen people died on the first day alone and many more were to follow on subsequent days, several at the airport itself when they sought refuge in their cars, turned on their car heaters and were asphyxiated.
The regular Qantas 707 transiting New York for London early in the morning had managed to land and, although authorities tried to keep the runways open with snowploughs, the snow kept falling as the airport closed. Despite difficulty differentiating the roadway from the sidewalk, Snelling finally reached the airport to find himself with a Boeing-load of stranded passengers and nowhere to accommodate them. His only alternative was to have the Boeing towed to a hangar and that’s where they stayed for the next 24 hours. They were not alone and by mid-morning 6000 people were stranded at Kennedy as passengers and airport workers waited out the storm.
With catering and toilet facilities stretched to the limit, Snelling spent the time overseeing passenger comfort in the primitive hangar facility, with BOAC providing the catering for breakfast, lunch and dinner while snowploughs continued their battle to open the airport.
It wouldn’t be the last weather-related incident that would give Peter Snelling cause for concern during his time at Qantas. Like Ian Burns-Woods, he would also be in Darwin when Cyclone Tracy arrived in December 1974.
Beyond the occasional dangers presented by war and weather, accommodation, as in those earlier years at places like Darwin and Papua New Guinea, was often far from ideal. While residing in a hotel in some exotic part of the globe might sound a romantic existence, crowded into the same room for months with your whole family while you searched for an appropriate house to rent tended to diminish its attractiveness, to say the least. Some were fortunate enough to be able to move into their predecessor’s residence, a factor that would have some bearing on how they remembered such a posting in later years.
The lengths of the postings themselves were often irregular and occasionally arbitrary. Two years was common but changed company requirements often intervened, creating the requirement for unforseen and, at times costly, cross-postings or a return to a Sydney assignment.
Pilot John Fulton was told he was to be based in London for two years as a first officer. He’d enjoyed nine months there and had purchased an MG 1100 as personal transport when his boss, Torchy Uren, ordered him home for promotion to captain on DC-4s. When Fulton tried to convince Sydney they should pay to bring his MG home, he was confronted by a typical catch-22 situation. ‘They told me I had to be there for two years for that,’ he says.
There were, however, some exceptions when it came to the length of postings and few in Qantas could match Ward Washington’s record as the airline’s longest-serving overseas manager. Indeed, Washington’s 40 years away from Sydney created something of a legend in Qantas and became a regular talking point among head office colleagues whenever postings were discussed, often eliciting humorous asides like: ‘Does Ward Washington really exist?’
Some postings would provide moments of high drama for the Washingtons. Shan Washington sensed something was wrong when she arrived at Manila airport on the morning of Sunday, 21 August 1983. Crowds packed the airport and it wasn’t until she was in the terminal that she was told Benigno Aquino had just arrived aboard a flight from Taipei. The former Senator Aquino, an outspoken opponent of the authoritarian rule of long-serving President Ferdinand Marcos, was returning home after three years in exile in the United States.
Then shots rang out. One of the airport staff quickly ushered Shan through the terminal as chaotic scenes broke out among Aquino supporters who had gathered to welcome his return. Aquino was dead, shot by soldiers as they escorted him off the aircraft.
Shan Washington’s and Joan Picken’s experiences in Manila and Belgrade respectively highlight the circumstances that could confront a Qantas wife on postings and there’s little doubt they would both sympathise with the Murdoch family when Jeff Murdoch arrived in Port Moresby as country manager in 1989.
By now Papua New Guinea was no longer the benign environment that had existed in the years when Qantas operated there in the 1950s. Local criminals, termed raskol gangs, roamed the streets of Port Moresby and other main centres to the point where the country was on its way to ultimately be listed as one of the most dangerous in the world. The Murdochs had been there less than a month when, returning from a shopping trip to the suburb of Boroko, Robyn Murdoch drove straight into a riot as Papua New Guinean soldiers took their pay grievances onto the streets. One minute she had stopped in the traffic wondering how to avoid the disturbance; the next minute, she had armed soldiers stomping up onto the car’s bonnet and over its roof.
One afternoon in September the same year, with four-year-old Sarah in the rear seat of the Mazda, Robyn stopped outside the Murray International School to collect their elder daughter Amy, when one of several raskols tore open the car door, jammed a knife at her throat
and reefed her out of the car. Amy, already in the front seat, had the presence of mind to run into the school shouting as she went, as teachers began to arrive on the scene.
But by then the raskols were driving off amid the screams of Sarah, still in the back seat. They had gone only a few hundred metres when a distraught Robyn saw the vehicle slow down as Sarah was thrown onto the roadway. Fortunately the child was uninjured but Murdoch believes the assailants had been unaware of their back-seat occupant when they first drove away.
Several weeks later police found the vehicle trashed at a village behind Port Moresby airport but by then the Murdochs had done some family soul-searching as to whether Papua New Guinea was really the place for them.
‘In the end we thought we had probably hit the “low” and it was all “up” from here,’ says Murdoch. He turned out to be right. ‘We stayed there three years and despite curfews and the like we made some great friends.’
There were, however, other posting ‘hazards’ who may not have been presented by carjackers, crazed escapees brandishing AK-47s or roadside bombs, but could be just as lethal in terms of career prospects.
One of the more critical assignments for Qantas station managers around the world was to meet and greet company board members, their families, and often their friends. Such people had to be given due deference and time often had to be spent ensuring they took away with them a good impression of their visit.
Beyond the chairman of the airline, each individual board member had equal status, but their demands often varied. Some asked for little help beyond perhaps a ‘meet and greet’ at the airport on arrival and a cursory check to see whether they needed anything during their stay. But human nature being what it is, others had an elevated view of their status as board members of Australia’s national carrier and often a great deal of a manager’s time was spent making sure their every whim was indulged.
Premium seats at sporting events, personal tours and access to the best table at signature restaurants were all part of the job for posted staff and even the most minor criticism of a station manager by a board member on his or her return home could have severe promotional implications and, in several cases at least, a quick return home from the posting.
Jim Bradfield, as manager in Greece, remembers greeting a lady friend of one Qantas chairman from a late-night arrival into Athens. She insisted on seeing the dawn rise over the Acropolis. Once that was achieved, she suggested another tour or two and a little shopping as well. Bradfield, by now showing the strain of having been up all night and with an important meeting to attend that day with Greek aviation officials, had to call on his wife to take over. ‘She was a lovely lady but she set a cracking pace,’ he recalls years later.
Even though some board members were undemanding, all station managers realised it was essential to keep a wary eye on their movements while they were visiting their area, often quietly smoothing the path behind the scenes when necessary. ‘And you made sure you were in attendance at the airport when they left, just to make sure if the flight was delayed you were on hand to calm the waters,’ says Bradfield.
Not to do so could be fatal for job prospects as Rick Granger was to find out on a posting to New York. Granger experienced two postings to the Americas region in the 1970s and 1980s and had the misfortune to have an important meeting with the company’s US lawyers clash with the arrival of the wife of a board director.
First clearing his dilemma with his boss in San Francisco, Granger delegated one of his senior female staff to do the job, only to have Murphy’s Law take over when she was unable to find the new arrival and returned to the office empty handed.
To make matters worse the board director’s wife had arrived with little money and was forced to use what she had to hire a taxi. When the director himself arrived two days later, Granger’s profuse apology appeared to be accepted but several months later he learnt that complaints had been lodged with management and his future prospects would be severely limited. Granger returned to Sydney on leave, found another job and resigned, going on to run a successful travel agency.
But despite the occasional traumas, most remember their postings with a high degree of fondness, benefiting from the experience and often creating friendships that last a lifetime. And those exotic locations such as London, Paris, San Francisco and Honolulu did exist for those fortunate enough to be posted there.
Some, of course, were more exotic than others. When Qantas opened its Fiesta Route through Tahiti and the Caribbean to London in the 1960s, Les Cassar was posted to Acapulco, a destination guaranteed to please any Qantas manager. Cassar also had the advantage of living across Acapulco Bay from the city and, to add to his good fortune, the Qantas station engineer who lived nearby had access to a speedboat.
Three or four days a week Cassar and the engineer took it in turns to water-ski across the bay to the Qantas office close to the opposite beach. Cassar then showered and changed into his work attire at the nearby Las Hamacas hotel before wandering in to work at his office, next door to the hotel.
But the days of postings to many of the more exotic ports are long gone, often avoiding the likelihood of staff ending up in a war zone. These ports have been sacrificed to the economic imperative of employing longer range aircraft capable of flying nonstop from Australia to destinations half way across the world. And while cities like London or San Francisco may still have their charms on the postings circuit, the days of water-skiing across Acapulco Bay are certainly over.
15
PENNY PINCHING AND CLASHING PERSONALITIES
Those who worked close to the top of the airline in its post-war years often have two primary recollections of those days. One is the emphasis on keeping tight budgets, which often led to extraordinary financial oversight by head office. The other is an almost total lack of rapport between its founder and chairman Hudson Fysh and Cedric Oban Turner, the man responsible for managing the airline.
The airline’s first chairman, Fergus McMaster, a western Queensland grazier of Scottish ancestry, had enough faith in the dreams of Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness to establish the airline in 1920 and while McGinness’s role in the company was relatively short, Fysh guided it through the years of war. He eventually succeeded McMaster in 1951, serving first in the joint roles of chairman and managing director and later as chairman until his own retirement in 1960.
A man of unquestionable morals and integrity, Fysh’s public persona was the outwardly austere, old-world image of a safe, reliable, dependable airline man. In his two decades at the top, he saw the company emerge from a few hundred staff who all knew each other to a globe-circling enterprise at the forefront of the world’s airlines.
In those early years of his chairmanship, Fysh never lost touch with the basic financial requirement for running an airline and Peter Picken’s assertion that ‘Fysh knew how much the second pencil the airline ever bought had cost,’ is probably not that far from the truth.
Even those of senior rank posted overseas had to be careful what they spent money on. Finding a suitable dwelling to live after arriving in London in the 1950s was not an easy task due to housing shortages but country manager Lou Ambrose had done better than most. He had found a flat in the exclusive Hyde Park Gate area, a stone’s throw from the residence of a Greek shipping magnate and the Australian high commissioner. Ambrose thought it an ideal location until he heard Fysh was scheduled to come to London for talks with BOAC. Concerned at what Fysh might think of his up-market ‘digs’, Ambrose temporarily moved in with another Qantas family until Fysh had left for home again.
Fysh’s influence obviously filtered down through the ranks of the finance department in those days. Within a week of arriving at his posting to Cairo, Charles Wade remembers a head office accounts clerk asking him the whereabouts of the Cairo petty cash float of five Egyptian pounds. When Wade cabled he had ‘no idea’, a return memo informed him his reply ‘simply wasn’t good enough’.
During his time in Cairo
, Wade would find there were times when Fysh’s strong wartime experiences fighting the Germans cost the company in other ways. When he set out to buy a company car, Wade found the most practical and inexpensive would be a Mercedes Benz, but word came back that there would never be approval for a German vehicle. Wade had to make do with a British model, even though it was more expensive.
During the critical years of Qantas expansion it was Fysh’s management style that led to direct confrontation with those who had come to believe that such a style was now a thing of the past. Fysh, as chairman and justifiably proud of his founder’s role, found it hard to contend with a new brand of executive who possessed a different vision for the airline’s future. The new order first came with the arrival of Cedric Oban Turner as general manager and developed into a situation at the very top of the airline that was little short of poisonous, on occasions splitting the airline into two camps: those who respected Fysh for his years of contribution and those who were convinced his time had passed. Eventually the relationship of the two men at the top plumbed such depths that Qantas old hands looking back still wonder how the airline even managed to function.
Turner and a later successor, Keith Hamilton, were the two men most credited with bringing the airline into the modern era, although Turner himself paid a price, never achieving the role he coveted: that of chairman. Born in Dubbo, New South Wales, he had spent several years with financial firms in Europe before gaining airline experience with Imperial Airways. An imposing character, good-looking and over six feet tall, he was recommended to Qantas by Imperial, but not before earning a reputation for abrasiveness, a trait that his former British colleagues later complained about in their dealings with him.