The Albatross and the Buffalo

I grew up around RAAF bases. My father was a helicopter pilot and as a kid, his world seemed larger than life. Stories of Vietnam, visiting the base and being held spellbound by the amazing aircraft, catching rides in the back of a Chinook, even having dad bring a Chinook to my primary school for show-and-tell (I still wonder how he justified that one… public relations maybe?).
All these memories came flooding back when I received some photo albums and boxes of memorabilia my mother had kept stored away. Photos of faces I could recognise, names that rang a bell, images that reminded me of the smell of “avgas” and the woca-woca sound of helicopter rotors. I wanted to know the stories of these men and their machines that was so much a part of my distant past. But I can’t ask my father as I lost him to cancer when I was in my early 20s, not too long after he had retired from the RAAF. This has given me a sense of urgency: What other stories have been lost, and what stories do we still hav