Interesting to see Avalon’s air show back in the sky again, tearing the heavens up with Avgas and rumbling thunder and sonic booms. Happening overhead all last week. Nothing like the shriek of a Mach1 or 2 fighter plane to remind you where you stand in this world – and the bottom of Australia’s not such a bad place in many regards.
Mind you, the Canadian bloke who fled south in 1981 to avoid any potential nuclear firefight in his neighbourhood could have picked a better spot than the Falkland Islands, which Argentina invaded a few months later. That sparked a larger conflagration with the British, the final scrap taking place a couple of Ks from his new home.
Couldn’t happen here, of course. Couldn’t possibly be a target with the Defence Department East Coast Armaments Complex smack next door to Avalon at Point Wilson. Who’s heard of Avalon anyway? Apart, that is, from the 30 countries, 700 companies and 40,000 attendees at its trade week sessions last time around.
Great affair the air show, and I genuinely love it. Grew up on a steady diet of Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs, Messerschmitts, Stukas, Sopwith Camels and Fokkers. But make no mistake the show’s much more than just entertainment – it is a major international weapons trade fair. Killing machines for sale. No-one’s buying the firepower on offer there to start up joyrides or barnstorming diversions. It’s serious business and the business is war. Or defence if you prefer euphemisms. Oh and the public’s not invited to the first four days of the air show, just in case you missed that.
Not that martial affairs are anything new to Avalon. The old Government Aircraft Factories were churning out Mirages and F/A-18 Hornets by the dozen back in the day. The street behind Cotton On’s distribution centre out there is named Hornet Drive.
Indeed, go back to the 1940s we were assembling Kittyhawks and Fairey Battlers next door at North Shore, and 12,000 sea mines at Ford. There was a secret squadron of Spitfires banging around the place after taking off from Wooloomanata station behind Avalon’s neighbouring You Yangs. RAAF pilots were being trained to fly them for missions in New Guinea. Locals were told the planes were ‘Capstans’ – same as a popular lung-buster of the day – but they knew better.
And if you think for a minute we really are at the who-cares ends of the earth, remember the story of Japanese pilots Nobuo Fujita and Shoji Okuda who flew across the Bellarine Peninsula next door on a recce mission of Melbourne in 1942. They arrived by submarine with a kit plane they assembled off King Island, reaching the mainland at Torquay and flying on to the Laverton RAAF base and over Melbourne before circling back, unscathed, to Bass Strait.
A Hornet might have been handy, given a secret war was going on at the time off the coast of NSW with Australian merchant ships being obliterated in scores by Japanese subs. That’s been kept pretty quiet over the years, even if we do know about the Sydney Harbour mini-subs from the same time.
An old William Strutt painting I have shows a military encampment at the You Yangs back in the 1800s, which I often wonder might not have been the Easter Volunteer Encampment at Little River that bushranger Harry Power bragged about walking through untouched. He was known locally by the name Johnson, his real name. No-one knew his young offsider would make an even bigger name as a bushranger – Ned Kelly.
So eyes up, you ever know who might be at the air show. I hope you didn’t miss the spectacle and all those magnificent men in their flying machines – even if it might have been from the Old Melbourne Road because you couldn’t get, or afford, a ticket.
Nothing’s cheap about this kind of hardware, after all. Except maybe the euphemisms.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 7 March 2023. Image: Geelong Advertiser
