An icon under the Southern Cross

Every May Racing Carnival, a silver Skyliner rumbles into Warrnambool Aerodrome filled with punters from the Big Smoke. This remarkable aircraft’s story began reluctantly in California long ago.

Gooney Bird departing Warrnambool Aerodrome
a C-47 military transport built in 1945
serving with the RAAF until 1987
still working out of Essendon

In the beginning . . .

It all started with a $335.59 phone call between American Airlines president C. R. Smith and industrialist Donald Douglas in 1934. Smith wanted a sleek new transport based on the revolutionary all-metal DC-2, which had just won handicap honours in the MacRoberston Air Race between London and Melbourne.

As a teenager, Cyrus Smith started his career managing a western clothing store in Minerva Texas. Attracted to aviation, his no-nonsense approach to business and straight talking style propelled him to the leadership of American Airlines. His vision was to fly airborne sleepers on the route between New York and Los Angeles. Douglas, who founded his aircraft empire in a Los Angeles barber shop was conservative and cautious. Smith’s proposal worried him. The Great Depression was biting hard, American Airlines was cash strapped, and no one else was building airliners with beds. But Smith argued that only Douglas had the skills to construct a suitable aircraft and eventually wooed the recalcitrant engineer.

The Douglas Sleeper Transport flew on 17 December 1935, accommodating 14 passengers in luxury berths, with dressing rooms and a honeymoon cabin up front. Then, in a stroke of genius, Douglas ripped out the beds for a day version called the DC-3. The extra space allowed 28 seats and the first airliner to turn a profit from passenger services took off, making all its hangar mates obsolete overnight. In four years, air travel grew five-fold and the Douglases accounted for 90% of it.

Downunder, the first DC-3 arrived in 1937 for the Melbourne to Sydney run with Australian National Airways. The rugged planes were ideal for Australian conditions and soon became a common sight in our skies. For decades, aircraft designers failed to reproduce its versatility. Operators claimed the only replacement for a DC-3 was another DC-3. So it served tenaciously on Australian scheduled services for forty years.

The venerable Skyliners are now semi retired. Of the 182 once on the Australian civil register, about 15 remain airworthy. You can still experience the 30’s style and curious thrill of walking uphill to your seat. Order a Manhattan and settle back in plush comfort with old-fashioned leg-room. Glimpse the aviators at work through half drawn curtains. There is nothing like a flight in the world’s most successful airliner.

Five fabulous facts

1943 General MacArthur is allocated Australian DC-3 VH-CXE for personal transport. To avoid offending dignitaries, the crew paint a nude on the starboard side of the fuselage hidden from the boarding door on the port side, and call her Shiny Shiela. The General approves but a staff officer doesn't and has it removed. The crew's revenge is to use the call-sign sexy [CXE] over the radio.

1947 The last of 10,645 [total number hotly debated] C-47/DC-3s leaves Douglas’s Oklahoma City plant.

1957 A Frontier Airlines DC-3 hits a mountain and loses 12 feet of wing. The remaining 500,000 rivets and the two pilots hold it together for a safe landing. Repaired, it returns to service in less than a month.

1967 Douglas Aircraft Corporation is declared bankrupt and Donald Douglas retires after 55 years in the business. Cyrus Smith leaves American Airlines the following year.

2011 The logbook of the restored VH-ABR Kanana currently based at Tullamarine records operating hours that add up to almost eight years in the air. In 1938, it was the third DC-3 to arrive in Australia and flew the last scheduled flight of type for Ansett-ANA in 1972.

VH-ABR Kanana 'the quiet' resting on the apron
still airworthy after a long hard working life
surviving 4 emergency belly landings
"they don't make 'em like they used to"

The way of the chicken

Four weeks ago I went cycling with a friend on a beautiful calm sunny winter morning. We headed for his mum's place and were treated to a sumptuous lunch. But all was not well. She is also a good friend and I detected tension at the table. The conversation soon revealed the cause; her three little bantams were being 'taken to the farm' that very afternoon - a euphemism for getting the chop. Jill was not at all happy about this, but what was a pensioner to do? The chooks were eight years old, hadn't laid for a year or more and were costing too much to keep.

change is imminent

Milly, Molly and Mandy in original coop 

After lunch, we menfolk gathered in the garden to clear away the vines that had overgrown the coop to prepare it for new residents. I couldn't take my eyes off Milly, Molly and Mandy or stop thinking about their imminent exit from this world. It seemed to me that the chooks were aware of impending change and were strutting and clucking in their run. They hadn't been let out to forage recently and were excited by the sunlight. And it looked like they'd been completely spoiled feed wise; the seeds in the feeder were like gourmet soup mix.

I suppose it was because I was the birdo in the group that it was decided that I should be the one to capture the girls [thanks a lot Tim!] and put them in a tiny grotty transport cage. Well, as soon as I lay hands on the first one, I just knew that I had to offer an alternative to the chop. These were smart alert birds and it was about time I was educated in The Way of the Chicken. They could spend their dotage in my garden eating bugs and fertilising the plants. I wasn't worried about eggs - I could get some young birds later for that.

adapting
MMM sisters on the scrounge

Milly, Molly and Mandy stayed in the laundry for the first couple of nights as I had nowhere else to put them. I quickly built a temporary coop called The Whitehouse and found a sheltered spot for them in my storm-swept garden. For the first weeks they were timid couch potatoes that ate very little, only venturing outside when forced. They would only stay out of the coop if I closed the hatch. After ten minutes, I'd find them hiding under a shrub so would let them back inside. I took them on walks around the garden to potential foraging places. A passing car or a raven call would see them panic and run headlong back to the coop. The resident magpies didn't help by swooping and sitting on the nearest post, watching the chooks intently. By the third week I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of my hospitality and pondered the possibility of chicken curry.

But then things changed. MMM began to spend an hour, then a whole morning foraging and exploring. Now, they've gone completely feral. This industrious threesome is out free ranging all day from dawn to dusk, eating weeds and turning over large areas of mulch. As I approach the coop soon after first light, they are eagerly clucking and stomping to be let out. When I crack the hatch, they pour out like paratroopers on a combat drop and disperse at the double to their favourite spots. The juvenile magpie joins them on occasion and the magpie parents tolerate much frenzied digging under their home tree. A spectacularly attractive long-toed wetland bird, the usually shy and furtive buff-banded rail, seems to have befriended the chooks and forages openly with them. The girls rarely return to the coop until dusk, when they gather regular as clockwork waiting for a hand-fed treat. After they've finished, they file inside one by one and hop onto their perch, fluff up and huddle together to roost for the night.

the first of many
fair dinkum free range eggs

Last Wednesday, one month to the day after their arrival, I found the first white egg nestled in the pea straw. My neighbour can't believe it and is calling me The Chook Whisperer; "Old chooks don't lay in winter," she told me. They must be happy. Jill tells me she wants them back now . . . with a wink and a nudge.

Apart from the delights of observing the behaviour of these birds, eating their fresh eggs and utilising the droppings, MMM have prompted me to return to a very satisfying core activity [not to mention biblical . . . OK I won't]; carpentry.

The Fortress nearing completion
original MMM design - two-part mobile coop and run
plans available soon from Rara Avis - contact johnh
[modelling by Daphne courtesy Plaster-o-Paris]

Biographical note: Milly, Molly and Mandy were named by an old local chook fancier and breeder. Milly Molly Mandy is the nickname of Millicent Margaret Amanda, the heroine in a series of novels by Joyce Lankester Brisley, popular with seven-year-old readers since 1928. The chooks were given to Jill eight years ago when the old-timer moved to Queensland and passed away. It turns out that they are pedigree show girls of a breed called Modern Game bantams, known for their hardiness, intelligence, endearing characters and attractive plumage. Their wild ancestors are members of the pheasant family and come from the jungles of Java. Like all Game birds, they were initially bred for cock fighting.

UPDATE: TUESDAY JULY 5, 2011

The Fortress citadel [coop]
goes operational

What do you think girls? Milly inspects the gangway; Molly goes straight in to view the furnishings; Mandy thinks it looks like a cubist vegetable and wonders where the old coop is.