© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Plane wreck a monument to a war hero and an ill-starred venture

Stand by your glasses steady, for each man who takes off and flies. Here’s to the dead already; three cheers for the next man who dies. Toast proposed by British World War 2 aircrew following the death of a comrade. Doug Swain DFC at Camden in about 1948. Photo by John Laming. In the foothills of the Barrington Tops, in NSW, pieces of a wrecked Lockheed Hudson aircraft are a lonely monument to the three men who died in the 1954 crash, including World War 2 bomber pilot Doug Swain DFC. The wreckage is also a…

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Newcastle girls helped build bombers

Mollie Clewett  was 21 years old and had only been married a year on November 29, 1943 when she started working as a machinist at Newcastle’s Lysaghts plant. It was wartime, and ever since the Japanese submarine bombardment of Newcastle, people in the city were acutely conscious of how much was at stake. Thousands of Hunter men were away fighting, creating a shortage of labour for vital war industries and opening opportunities for young women like Mollie to work in jobs that would have been closed to them just a few years before. Mollie's husband, Dick,…

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