Flying / Australia
Airdate:
Thursday - March 9, 1972
WOR Show WOR Rerun
(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)
First Spoken Line After Theme Ends
By George, yes indeed - By the way, may I say. . . .
Show Description
[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]
He opens with a flying disclaimer, then describes a Qantas flight from Darwin to Sydney. Darwin is tropical and remote, near the Coral Sea and WWII battle zones; Sydney is as different from it as Skowhegan is from New York. He treats the old sailing voyage to Australia as the era's equivalent of space travel, citing Alan Moorehead on the Beagle, and recalls that early reports of kangaroos were disbelieved. He adds his own night encounter with a large kangaroo outside Sydney, notes that locals treat them as crop pests, and remembers Radio Australia’s VK2ME identifying with the kookaburra call on shortwave.
That leads into a short argument that possessions immobilize you and that travel, since his 1957 around-the-world trip, reordered his priorities. After the book ad (Philip Roth's "Our Gang" and F. Lee Bailey's "The Defense Never Rests"), he urges listeners to pick destinations they actually want—Khartoum as a status example—rather than the usual Paris or London.
Australia, for him, is clean, vast, and full of "doers." The Darwin - Sydney leg at about 38–39,000 feet crosses moon-like outback: craters, dry prehistoric riverbeds, daytime heat around 130°F, no tracks, School of the Air by two-way radio, and mail by light plane. The cabin is full of Australians heading to Sydney for Anzac Day (the Gallipoli memorial). He contrasts their affection for their country with the "put-down" mood he hears in the U.S., France, and England, and likens Sydney to San Francisco.
The longest set piece is a weekend on a Short Sunderland flying boat from Sydney Harbour to Lord Howe Island—about 150 people, banana plantations, a supply boat every few months, two volcanic peaks, and a lagoon so clear the hull seemed suspended. The ex-WWII pilot drives him up a ridge at sunset to an empty horseshoe beach facing south toward the pole. He ties the island’s odd wildlife back to Darwin, then briefly ranks New Zealand among the most beautiful places on earth and notes its lingering 1930s feel (old Chryslers and Graham-Paiges still in daily use). A Fiji-weekend ad in a hotel lobby underlines how far from home he is.
He closes with a private flight to Coffs Harbour: Sunday lawn bowls in white, then a banana plantation run by an American former Olympic miler, gin-and-tonic on the porch, a Polynesian woman with drinks—explicitly framed as a Somerset Maugham scene. The show ends by repeating that money spent on junk would be better spent traveling, and that he wants to go back to Australia, before handing off to Lester Smith and the news.
This Show
