TUESDAY 22 MARCH     ADELS GROVE

It was the same sort of day as yesterday.

There was a party of work experience students from Doomadgee here, and John was tasked with supervising them and working with them. We wondered if there were any who remembered him from when we were there in 2002. They assembled and oiled deck furniture, but John found them pretty sloppy and unenthusiastic workers. No surprise there, as they were part of the group of boys deemed unsuitable for classroom education!

We were told about a fly-in guest, last year, who landed on the airstrip with his wheels UP! How embarrassing – not to mention costly – would that be? Apparently, he’d just bought this new plane and his old one had a fixed undercarriage, so he wasn’t in the habit of thinking about wheels. I could envisage a scenario where he was wondering what that alarm noise was, and thinking he would look up the manual after he landed……..

Even worse for the poor man was that he had to stick around for a while until the required repair work was organized. No doubt the subject of a lot of whispered comments on the dining deck, at night.