The planter behind the airline

Herbert Kienzle of the Yodda Valley, Papua, is a monument to private enterprise and of devotion to his chosen country. He has spent nearly 43 years of peace and war be tween Port Moresby and the Yodda, via Kokoda.

His father was Alfred Karl Kienzle who left Germany as a youth and became a naturalised Briton in England.

He went to Fiji before 1900 and settled at Levuka, where he had copra and banana plan tations in various districts as well as being manager of a German trading firm.

He married the daughter of the Harbourmaster, Captain Wallace Wilson, and had two sons and two daughters. Bert was the eldest, born in May, 1905, and his brother, Wallace, was the youngest, the mother dying on the day he was born, in 1914.

Alfred married again, a few months later, his second wife being a Miss Pearse of Western Australia. By this time the war had broken out, and after a few quiet years the exploits of Count von Luckner started a wave of intense anti-German feeling in Fiji (for more on von Luckner see p. 83). Alfred was arrested and sent to intern ment in Australia, despite his British passport.

His four children and their Australian stepmother were sent to internment camps in

New South Wales. In these camps Bert picked up his first knowledge of the German lan guage.

In 1920 the family was re united in Sydney, and as they had lost all their properties in Fiji, Alfred started an import export firm in Sydney. Bert and his two sisters were sent to their grandfather Kienzle in Germany for schooling, while young Wallace went to school in Sydney. After five years in Germany, Bert returned to Sydney to join his father’s busi ness.

By 1927 Bert was 22, and he sailed for Papua to become an assistant on Kanosia Estate, a rubber plantation west of Port Moresby. Seven years later he became manager of Yodda Goldfields Ltd., and also began planting rubber on his own account. In 1936 he married Meryl Holliday, and they have three sons and two daughters. Bert’s younger brother Wally joined him in 1935, and their father, Alfred, also joined them, having changed his name to Kingsley to renounce all ties with Nazi Germany.

When the Japanese War broke out, Bert was on leave in Australia with his family. He left them there and returned to his work on the Yodda.

When the Japanese landed at Rabaul a few months later he reported to ANGAU at Port

A Brett Hilder Profile