Retired newspaperman MICHAEL GIULIANO was moved to see a series of stories in the Gazette last month recounting the tragic death of five Bunyip mates in a Northern Territory air crash in December 1967. He was among the last people to see the group alive and the events still haunt him to this day. Now retired and living on the Gold Coast, Michael said he would be happy to speak to anyone about that tragic event almost five decades ago.
“I have to admit it was strangely eerie to recount the events, realising it was almost half a century ago, yet to me it was yesterday.”
I HAVE just received the copy of the Pakenham Gazette with the series of stories Family Retraces Fatal Flight (12 October 2016).
These focused on the trip taken by Ben and Seamus Scanlon, the nephews of Michael Breheny, who was tragically killed with his Bunyip football mates Peter Kay, Barry Sullivan, Noel Heatley and Don Smith in a light plane crash in the Northern Territory some 49 years ago.
I wrote the story (Young Witness, in Young, NSW) published in that issue of the Gazette, which I called The Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machine (named after the 1965 movie of the same name) after I met the Bunyip adventurers in Ayres Rock on a stop-over in 1967.
They were flying; we were driving. I was with two others: Clyde Hodgins the motoring journalist for the Sydney Sun and the Sunday Sun-Herald and Dale Goodman, an engineer from Chrysler Australia, who supplied the vehicle for our trip.
I have never experienced anything like this, where a story I wrote – from the heart because I had not made any notes – resurfaces some 49 years later and it affected me, Clyde Hodgins and Dale Goodman as we travelled in the opposite direction to the plane and learned of the crash as we approached Adelaide.
A news flash announced that a plane with six people from Victoria had been lost in a crash in the Northern Territory.
No names had been released but when we arrived in Adelaide I phoned the Adelaide Advertiser and recognising the fact that the names could not be released, asked if the person at the newspaper would “confirm whether or not these names were on the manifest”.
I stated two names for the person on the phone. My heart sank when she confirmed them. We three were devastated then and it concerns me still, now.
However my grief is peripheral compared to the grief that affected so many lives in all the families and friends of those five young footballers – and not forgetting the parents, relatives and friends of the young pilot, Peter Limon.
That this story has stayed with me and is always fresh in my mind stems from a coincidence that I was at Ayres Rock (now known as Uluru) the same time as Michael Breheny and his mates were there.
But the story may have ended there had not Michael’s sister, Barbara Breheny (as she was known then; Barbara Rix now) followed up on the story I wrote, having received a copy of our newspaper, The Young Witness, from a relative in Adelaide (another coincidence).
I have to admit it was strangely eerie to recount the events, realising it was almost half a century ago, yet to me it was yesterday, as we (Michael, Noel, Barry, Don and Peter Kay together with Clyde, Dale and I), stood around in the galvanised iron shed that was called a ‘bar’, sipping cold beer as we talked and laughed and drank the night away.
Sometime after 1am we were trying to come up with the word ‘monolith’ in relation to Ayers Rock being the largest ‘something’ in the world. We all had to concede defeat on that effort!
The best Noel could come up with was ‘rock’, but there was no prize for that word because everybody knew it was called Ayers Rock!
Michael Breheny and the others talked excitedly about the flight and joked that the ‘stall’ light used to come on as they were taking off, because the plane was so overweight. That was the reason they offloaded clothing and anything else they could do without to lighten the load.
They also praised the pilot (Peter Limon) because he was careful in that he drew on his previous experiences in the Outback to ensure he always carried extra fuel in case of emergencies.
Peter drank little or not at all and left early for bed (about 9pm as I recall). Not that anyone drank heavily anyway; we each just enjoyed the company and the lively conversation.
In the morning I got them all up to watch the Rock change colour as the sun rose and bathed it in different shades of light and then later we had breakfast together in the Red Line Motel dining room.
Around 9.30am Peter Limon took off into the wind, then flew the plane back towards us and dipped the wings to say goodbye in the traditional manner as they roared off into the sky while we were faced with a 1593 kilometre drive to Adelaide.
They were off on the rest of what they regarded as their “great adventure”, resplendently dressed in shorts and shirts and long socks while we were in jeans and a dust-covered car, which was brand new, straight from the factory: a Chrysler VIP, not yet released to the general public, but looking like it had been through the wringer because we had been tough on it as part of the testing we were doing for the Sydney newspapers, the Sun and the Sun-Herald.
Our only home comfort was an after-market air-conditioner, which had been fitted to the Chrysler so that we could test it in the Outback heat.
A motor vehicle air-conditioner was something we had only heard about in 1967 and when it worked it was luxurious.
Unfortunately, it only worked on good dry flat roads or the rare bitumen roads we found. On rough roads the air conditioner almost fell apart and the Chrysler engineer we had on board, Dale Goodman, had to repair it each night, so that we could use it sparingly the next day.
Dale was an excellent driver as well as a great engineer and on our way to Darwin on the National Highway – which was a well-made bitumen road with a lane in each direction – a few days prior to our visit to Ayers Rock, he was driving at 140kph (there were no speed limits in the Northern Territory) as dawn broke.
We were both wearing seat belts and I was beside him talking to keep him awake when a bunch of about 30 kangaroos decided they would jump out of the bush on our left and cross the road right in front of us.
One roo we might avoid, but 30? In the split second it takes to react, Dale said to me: “There’s only one thing to do” and he hit the brakes hard and spun the steering wheel.
In the back seat also wearing a seat-belt, the Sun-Herald motoring journalist Clyde Hodgins woke to find the trees rushing at him (or vice versa) and then the car stopped, as suddenly as the spin began.
Dale had executed a perfect emergency stop basically in the length of the motor car, did not touch one kangaroo and the vehicle did not leave the bitumen, having performed a 180 degree turn and leaving a black rubber ‘U’ permanently in the road as a testament to good driving.
Two days later, on the dirt road to Ayers Rock, again Dale was at the wheel when he hit a pothole invisible to the naked eye because it was full of bull dust. We were travelling at 150kph.
The car leapt in the air but we were each in our seat belts and safe. However, my camera equipment in its padded bag, hit the roof of the car and landed back on the seat. Fine, red bull dust filled the car.
Our adventure was in the relative (if rough) safety of the ground. We made it back to Sydney and returned the car to the Chrysler factory after covering more than 11,000 kilometres in 14 days, which included an overnight stay in Brisbane when we went to dinner with some Chrysler executives; a stopover in Alice Springs for Christmas Day with 100 other revellers in the big motel dining room, as well as a day in Darwin where I went looking for big gun emplacements from World War II and a day in Adelaide at the Chrysler factory obtaining new tyres and having a new petrol tank fitted.
Plus, Clyde cheekily decided to pay a surprise visit to the Holden factory at Elizabeth (a suburb of Adelaide) where I stood on the Chrysler’s roof, taking photos with a telephoto lens of the unreleased new Holden model, so that the Sunday Sun-Herald ran exclusive photos of the new Holden, beating Holden to the release of its own car.
To add insult to injury our Chrysler carried a large white sign on both doors indicating it was on a test drive around Australia sponsored by the Sunday Sun-Herald, but security was lax at the Holden factory and the big Australian motor manufacturer was embarrassed at being gazumped.
Thinking back, it was a coincidence that of all the people who could have been at the Rock on the day the young men landed, it was fortunate that of the only three other people who were there, one was a journalist who was able to write the story of the last known physical contact the men from Bunyip had with the outside world.
It was that story and that contact which resulted in my wife and me being invited to the opening of the memorial to Don, Peter, Michael, Noel and Barry and cemented our relationship with Bunyip and its citizens.
Equally interesting is that the connection is still there.
But an even greater coincidence occurred in 1969 when Barry Sullivan’s mother and Barbara Breheny decided they would visit the crash site just like the Ben and Seamus did, some 47 years later.
As part of that trip they spent two weeks in the Outback – literally in the middle of nowhere in central Australia – at a property which could barely be called a tin shed, with civilisation more than 200 kilometres in any direction.
The couple with whom they were staying had two children and a nanny (age about 19, from Adelaide).
Barbara and Mrs Sullivan planned on calling on my wife and me at Young (in South West NSW where we lived) if they could weave the visit into the trip.
When they mentioned “visiting Young” in conversation the nanny suddenly said: “I have relatives at Young. Who are you visiting?”
When Barbara replied “the Giulianos” the nanny said: “They are my relatives!” That must have been at least a million-to-one chance!
If anyone would like to talk to me, ask questions about the trip or whatever else you need to know, please feel free email me at mpg2411@outlook.com.
Michael Giuliano,
Elanora,
Queensland.
