To The Solomons

On The Whoop From Nauru To The Solomons

By Judy Tudor

It’s a long, long way to Nauru by air but the return journey we made in late January, in Operation Teenage Uplift, seemed a lot, lot further.

ITHE plane was an old DC4, • normally used by TAA on freighting between Melbourne and Brisbane but for this exercise it had been equipped with five-in-a-row, utility, non-reclining type seats.

The purpose of the expedition was to take holidaying primary school teachers and others back to Nauru and bring 48 Nauru secondary school students back to Australia.

I went along for the ride at the invitation of the Nauru Administra tion and the Australian Department of Territories.

The plane left Melbourne—the Australian focal point of most things Nauruan—at 5.30 p.m., reached Brisbane at 10 p.m., flew all night and reached Honiara, BSIP, a little after 6 a.m., and Nauru at 1 p.m.

It is not a trip one would want to undertake every week but as Nauru has been having one plane service approximately every three years, this chance to take a quick look at the famous island could not be missed.

The return flight carried about half a dozen adults and the 48 Nauruan teenagers, mostly Administration scholarship holders going to school in Australia. The plane left Nauru —with almost everyone on the island watching it—at 7.30 a.m. on Thurs day, January 28, with the idea of getting right through to Melbourne the same day, arriving about mid night.

Oil Leak There was a slight amount of fiddling with the hydraulic system at the end of the runway before we took off from Nauru and by the time we had reached Honiara, four hours later, half the oil in the system that works the undercarriage and the wing flaps had leaked away.

The plane carried three pilots but no engineer and although the engineer of the local BSIP airline did his best, after three hours’ delay the plane was pronounced un serviceable.

Big panic in the ranks—what to do with 48 Nauruan teenagers who have the exuberance of all Poly nesians and a mercurial elusiveness all their own?

These kids could disperse to more ways at once than any I’ve ever seen and the poor bloke from Terri tories Department, Mr. P. J. Allison- Alsop, who had gone along to supervise the operation, lost half a stone in three days just trying to ride herd on them.

Finally, the girls were ac commodated in the Mendana Hotel and the boys at the hospital at the other end of the town, and all ate at the Mendana; but within 24 hours it was difficult to know who lived where. The kids swarmed all over Mr. Ken Dalrymple-Hay’s hotel, with their guitars, mouth-organs, tape-recorders and transistor radios going full blast; they sat up at the cocktail bar and drank large quantities of ginger-pop, bought watermelons from the market and Chinese hats, ukeleles and more transistors from the Chinese stores.

On the second day of the hold up it was announced that Australia required everyone coming from the Solomons to be vaccinated for smallpox, and 16 of the kids were done before the regulations were read a second time, when it was

As planes do not often land at Nauru these days, a big crowd turned up at Nauru's airstrip to welcome the arrival of the first TAA DC-4 to make a charter trip from Australia.

discovered that vaccination was not required.

Meantime the airways agents were trying to communicate with Mel bourne over rescue operations.

After 24 hours it was announced that an Aztec plane from Rabaul was on its way with an engineer and a spare part, and in the hope that it would reach Honiara by dark, the local PWD rigged flood lights

at the airstrip so that the job could be done overnight.

But no plane arrived and it was somehow ascertained —probably by smoke-signal or carrier pigeon— that the part and the engineer would have to await the arrival of the DCS at 3 p.m. on Saturday.

This plane finally arrived and so did the engineer and the part. It took exactly 10 minutes to install it but by then Honiara Airport had run out of hours—at least as far as this flight was concerned. It is not equipped for night landings and had the plane got half way on its journey and then had to turn back it would have been unable to land.

Departure must await the next dawn.

Lively Company

So, three days after we should have reached our destination, we presented ourselves once more at Henderson airfield, counted heads — only two missing and they had merely returned to the hospital to hunt for a mislaid transistor radio— and embarked.

Whatever dampening of spirits there might have been in the Thurs day departure from Nauru had now long dissipated. For seven hours, south-west across the Coral Sea, the plane seethed like an angry ant-hill as kids swopped seats, sang, chewed, whooped and screamed at bumps and played guitars.

I left them in Brisbane and took a jet home. As I left, I heard the Nauruans being called simultaneously on all the public-address systems along the length of the tarmac in Brisbane. They had, of course, seeped out of the stark, uninterest ing international terminal in Bris bane, in short order, and swept like a tide into the coffee shops, cigarette bars and bookstalls of the neighbouring domestic airlines.

Some of the Nau ruan girls make themselves at home on the verandah of the Hotel Mendana in Honiara.