It was an interesting experience, but nothing can compare to the coincidences I have encountered since planning my quest in Darwin recently to trace my father’s World War II experiences in northern Australia, when he was a member of the No 1 Airfield Construction Squadron, RAAF, surveying airstrips from 1942-1945.

Earlier this year, Helen Bryan of Forster and I booked a Bill Peach Indigenous Art Air Cruise,  which was to take us to Nhulunbuy (Gove), Groote Eylandt and various destinations in the Kimberley.

We were very excited, but at the last minute, four people pulled out, so the journey was cancelled. In the meantime, Helen had arranged another Kimberley adventure to row down the Ord River with members of the Great Lakes’ Pearl Dragons - Dragon Boat Club after which, I would meet up with her in Darwin anyway, mostly because she wanted to trace her father’s footprints when he too was in Darwin during the war.

Prior to my departure for the Top End I was invited to give a talk at the Friends of the Great Lakes Library on the subject of the self-proclaimed anthropologist, Daisy Bates and before the meeting I encountered a most interesting woman, Noelle White, who told me she’d been on the local radio station recently, giving a talk about her lifetime experiences called Up Over to Down Under and during the course of the conversation told me she had lived in Murrurundi not too far from Tamworth.

Ah, I said, do you happen to know Lyn White, a former colleague of mine when we both worked in the television industry in Sydney? ‘Yes’ Noelle said, ‘she’s my favourite cousin, she lives in Darwin now.’ As I was going to Darwin soon I leapt at the opportunity to ask for Lyn’s ‘phone number, called her in advance and arranged to meet up with her again in June, which was a great reunion after 30 years.

Sadly, in the meantime, Noelle died suddenly aged 90 or thereabouts, so it became my melancholy duty to break the news to Lyn.

In Darwin, Helen and I were joined at our AirB and B by two of her friends from our Great Lakes region, Wendy Lum ,Halliday’s Point and Brenda Taute, Forster Keys who had also been dragon-boating down the Ord.

It turns out that Wendy is a friend of one of my former colleagues and dear friend of 30 years, Marilynne Vietnieks, once the Archivist for the ABC and now Archivist at Hills Grammar School, where Wendy’s husband was once employed as a horticulturalist.

Brenda informed me that she lived in Singleton (my ole home town) for many years when her husband was employed by one of the district’s huge coal mines. During the course of our conversation on the subject it emerged that the son of my friend, Allan ‘Hack’ Whatham, married Brenda’s daughter, so Hack and Brenda share grandchildren.

Helen and I had a wonderful journey of discovery in the Top End and we have both decided we could return to Darwin as soon as another opportunity presented itself. 2017 is the 75th anniversary of the day the first bombs fell in Darwin on 19/2/42, so we were able to explore many new absorbing exhibits on the subject in various museums and libraries so we emerged enlightened.

We both feel a great affinity with the northern city.

It was my birthday the day after I returned to Tuncurry and I was given two beautiful silver pendants by one friend who lives in Merrylands, Sydney and another who lives in the Sydney CBD. In Lane Cove recently, in the window of a boutique in Longueville Road I encountered both pendants displayed on shop-makers’ dummies.

The weekend after I arrived home, I received a telephone call from a friend in Melbourne, Bill Fitzwater, to inform my husband and me that a mutual friend and colleague in Sydney, Bob Forster, had recently died. The last time I had a conversation with Bob (Bill was there) he was explaining to me how the name of our town, Forster, has always been mispronounced with the silent ‘r’ and how it should be changed to ‘For–ster’, the way he pronounces his name. Needless to say the discussion did not reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Our friend Bill, on learning that I had just returned from Darwin, wanted to know what I was doing up there.

When I told him about my quest he asked me whether dad had had anything to do with Liberator long-range bomber aircraft. Well, no, not dad, but his brother, Ray Borchers and his cousin, Eric Wilksch, had both been posted to separate Liberator squadrons and both were based in the Top End from 1942-1946. On learning this Bill told me that his friend, Lyn Gorman, is currently involved in the restoration of a Liberator bomber (the only one in Australia) in a hangar at an airfield at Werribee in Victoria and that I should contact her.

Exciting stuff.

When I contacted Lyn she was most interested in the fact that Cousin Eric was attached to a Dutch Liberator Squadron (18) in Darwin and has asked for more information, which I was able to provide in a flash. It took me a few days, however, to scratch around in my files to learn that my uncle, Ray Alan Borchers, a navigator, was assigned to 24 Liberator Squadron, the same squadron in which her father was a pilot. Oh for goodness sake.

More coincidences between Lyn and myself are many and varied. I attended a one-teacher school at Warkworth in the Hunter Valley, near our family farm. Lyn was born in Tamworth and attended a one teacher school outside the ‘city of light’, near where she lived on the family farm. My mother, May Willis, was born in Tamworth in 1910 and her mother, May Patterson was born circa 1885 in her family home ‘Calrossy’ Tamworth, now a prestigious girls’ school.

The school, now known simply as ‘Calrossy’, is where Lyn happened to have been a boarder for all her secondary school years. My mother was also a boarder at ‘Calrossy’ and was among the first intake of students in 1919 when the school was known as Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, Tamworth, later Tamworth Church of England Girls’ School and much later ‘Calrossy’.

Is this weird or what?

At a house-warming party here in Tuncurry last week I was chatting to the secretary of the Blue Water Fishing Club, Wayne Hall, who happens to believe that Marine Rescue NSW Forster-Tuncurry is the heart and soul of our region. Wayne told me he used to work on the Mt Thorley/Warkworth coal mine for many years. I then lamented how the coal mines had destroyed the tiny community of Warkworth, where I grew up and mentioned that most of the houses have gone now, including ours. Even Errol Bates, I added, had had no choice when the mining company wanted to buy his sheep station. ‘Is this the same Errol Bates’ Wayne inquired, ‘who lived in Aberdeen and was on the council there?’ ‘It had to be one and the same’ I said, ‘Errol and his family moved up that way when his Wambo property was sold’ in the mid-1970s.

Errol Bates is highly significant in my life because not only did we go to primary school together but he was the first boy I ever kissed when I was ten and a half years old!

Earlier this week at a meeting of Friends of the Great Lakes’ Library when my husband, Max, was giving a talk on Early days working in ABC television, we were introduced to a woman called Carmel, a neighbour of friends of ours in Forster. ‘Do you know Natalie Green, my daughter, who used to work at the ABC in Sydney?’

Carmel wanted to know. Yes, yes, we both said, yes we do, but neither of us could quite put a finger on how we actually knew her. On the way home, the penny dropped. In 1995 each of us was involved in a street parade, in George Street, Sydney, organised by the ABC, to re-enact the day, 50 years earlier, that World War II had ended. Next time I saw Carmel I was able to give her a copy of a photograph of Natalie and me at Circular Quay, dressed by our wardrobe department, in street fashion of the 1940s.

Crazy.

This afternoon, on our local radio station, 101.5 Great Lakes FM, I heard a promotion for a reading of Noelle White’s book, Up Over to Down Under. It seems Lyn arrived by Flying Boat at Rose Bay during the War and was met by her future husband, Peter White, of Murrurundi.

Oh what does it all mean I ask myself?