Post by corsair67 on Feb 20, 2007 13:54:51 GMT 12
From The Courier Mail.
Amazing escape
By Phil Hammond
January 19, 2007 11:00pm
HE WAS a young bloke, not long out from England. And when Jim Westray found himself one of three injured aircraft crash survivors, marooned in remote rainforest in the backblocks of Queensland's Border Ranges, he opted to become the one to go for help.
Back at the site of the Stinson wreckage, four people were dead and badly injured passenger John Proud lay immobile with maggots eating the dying flesh of his shattered leg. The other injured survivor, Joe Binstead, crawled daily to find berries and water to bring to his companion.
This was the desperate scene in one of Queensland's greatest rescues, when on February 19, 1937, the three-engined Stinson aircraft VH-UHH took off from Archerfield on a scheduled flight to Sydney.
Engulfed in low cloud somewhere above the valley township of Kerry, south of Beaudesert, the aeroplane slammed into treetops and the ensuing official search for it never came close.
There were reports of the Stinson being seen flying out to sea near Coffs Harbour. But when young hill farmer Bernard O'Reilly discussed the mysterious disappearance with his brother Herb in Kerry, he decided to follow a hunch.
It was a week after the aircraft's disappearance and the official search was being scaled down, when O'Reilly saddled up an old chestnut mare named The Great Unknown and rode the track out to the lip of the Mt Warning caldera.
From there, the bushman struck west, leaving the horse to make its way home to what is still the O'Reilly's Guesthouse in the Green Mountains section of Lamington National Park.
With a corn sack for a raincoat, a jam tin billy, some tea, bread and onions, O'Reilly battled through the dense growth, negotiating fallen trees, lawyer vines, wait-a-while briars and jungle-like foliage.
Climbing a tree to get his bearings at Mt Throakban, O'Reilly saw an odd brown patch 12km away on a forested hillside and decided to investigate. A tree had burned in the crash and as O'Reilly got closer, he heard the "cooee" calls of Binstead and Proud.
Finding the survivors 10 days after the crash was the first great achievement. Getting help was the other. And it was as O'Reilly made his way down the mountainous water course that is upper Christmas Creek, heading towards the Kerry Valley, that he caught up with Westray.
O'Reilly's daughter Rhelma, who was six years old when her father set out to find the wreck, recalled how he had thought the young man was sitting on a rock, resting. He approached to discover Westray dead, with a cigarette stub burned down to the fingers.
Not knowing the bush, it appeared the Englishman had clung to shallow rooted plants as he climbed down the side of a waterfall. They had pulled free and he had been fatally injured in the fall.
As if accessing the crash site was not tough enough, O'Reilly alerted valley farmers, supervised the cutting of a rudimentary "stretcher track" back to the wreck site and helped carry the survivors out of the wilderness.
When O'Reilly's wife, Viola, saw her husband again, she at first did not recognise him. In the days-long search and rescue effort, he had shed 16kg.
Seventy years have passed since Australia, then the world were stunned by news of the sensational rescue.
Since then, hundreds, if not thousands of people, have found their way to the aircraft wreckage; some to souvenir parts of it, most to challenge themselves on one of Queensland's greatest off-track hikes.
Amazing escape
By Phil Hammond
January 19, 2007 11:00pm
HE WAS a young bloke, not long out from England. And when Jim Westray found himself one of three injured aircraft crash survivors, marooned in remote rainforest in the backblocks of Queensland's Border Ranges, he opted to become the one to go for help.
Back at the site of the Stinson wreckage, four people were dead and badly injured passenger John Proud lay immobile with maggots eating the dying flesh of his shattered leg. The other injured survivor, Joe Binstead, crawled daily to find berries and water to bring to his companion.
This was the desperate scene in one of Queensland's greatest rescues, when on February 19, 1937, the three-engined Stinson aircraft VH-UHH took off from Archerfield on a scheduled flight to Sydney.
Engulfed in low cloud somewhere above the valley township of Kerry, south of Beaudesert, the aeroplane slammed into treetops and the ensuing official search for it never came close.
There were reports of the Stinson being seen flying out to sea near Coffs Harbour. But when young hill farmer Bernard O'Reilly discussed the mysterious disappearance with his brother Herb in Kerry, he decided to follow a hunch.
It was a week after the aircraft's disappearance and the official search was being scaled down, when O'Reilly saddled up an old chestnut mare named The Great Unknown and rode the track out to the lip of the Mt Warning caldera.
From there, the bushman struck west, leaving the horse to make its way home to what is still the O'Reilly's Guesthouse in the Green Mountains section of Lamington National Park.
With a corn sack for a raincoat, a jam tin billy, some tea, bread and onions, O'Reilly battled through the dense growth, negotiating fallen trees, lawyer vines, wait-a-while briars and jungle-like foliage.
Climbing a tree to get his bearings at Mt Throakban, O'Reilly saw an odd brown patch 12km away on a forested hillside and decided to investigate. A tree had burned in the crash and as O'Reilly got closer, he heard the "cooee" calls of Binstead and Proud.
Finding the survivors 10 days after the crash was the first great achievement. Getting help was the other. And it was as O'Reilly made his way down the mountainous water course that is upper Christmas Creek, heading towards the Kerry Valley, that he caught up with Westray.
O'Reilly's daughter Rhelma, who was six years old when her father set out to find the wreck, recalled how he had thought the young man was sitting on a rock, resting. He approached to discover Westray dead, with a cigarette stub burned down to the fingers.
Not knowing the bush, it appeared the Englishman had clung to shallow rooted plants as he climbed down the side of a waterfall. They had pulled free and he had been fatally injured in the fall.
As if accessing the crash site was not tough enough, O'Reilly alerted valley farmers, supervised the cutting of a rudimentary "stretcher track" back to the wreck site and helped carry the survivors out of the wilderness.
When O'Reilly's wife, Viola, saw her husband again, she at first did not recognise him. In the days-long search and rescue effort, he had shed 16kg.
Seventy years have passed since Australia, then the world were stunned by news of the sensational rescue.
Since then, hundreds, if not thousands of people, have found their way to the aircraft wreckage; some to souvenir parts of it, most to challenge themselves on one of Queensland's greatest off-track hikes.