I am a great admirer of the author Robert Caro, the pre-eminent authority on Lyndon Johnson, for his command of detail and the thoroughness of his research. In my view, Sarah Byrn Rickman is drawn from the same gene pool, for her definitive work on the WASP during WWII, entitled WASP of the Ferry Command: Women Pilots, Uncommon Deeds.
Now...it did not start well. A wifely expletive, just as I'd closed the door of the apartment; the gut-chilling realisation that the security swipe card and keys were inside. So too, the bag containing the flight tickets and a wad of currency. Duck indeed! Contact the building manager. He'd gone home. Messages left, taxi cancelled. Time critical, called Wendy's daughter Emily, a last resort. She had a spare key and security swipe card, but was also 25 minutes away, and with Sydney traffic ...
When I was but a nipper, my folks couldn’t afford to buy me a bike. (No, I am not one of the four Yorkshiremen, this is not a tale of whose poverty is the greatest, wins a-la M Python!).
On a drizzling day, when a distant British Queen sanctioned a Phillipant Australian Prime Minister’s “Captain’s Call,” turning a Pommy (Aussie slang for English) Duke (Phillip the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband) into Knight, we celebrated Australia Day on Sydney Harbour, afloat on a boat.
Any walk along the Sydney Harbour foreshore which starts with a ferry ride is guaranteed to lighten your step, if not your backpack if you weaken to the lure of that energy providing chocolate bar which you plan to munch mid journey.
In colonial times, the military usually took the best spots of settlement, you know, security and all that, although Governors and their ilk generally didn’t fare too badly, either. On the tops of hills where in the days before planes, you could see the enemy coming, by ship, foot or horse, there were often forts with tunnels to gun-ports.
When you ride the rails to Red Rock, it is almost as though you expect the clock to be at High Noon, and Gary Cooper to be waiting as you alight on the long platform at nearby Coff’s Harbour, from the aptly acronym-ed, Xpress Train (XPT). Hardly a bullet train, more a “hold-ster” really, although it was sparsely peopled when I rode it.
