Ben Buckley’s exit an unlikely end to a dangerous life
Ben Buckley was a country pilot with a maverick streak of mischief, but under the bulldust and barnstorming he was a local hero.
Andrew Rule
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They will tell a power of stories about Ben Buckley at his funeral this Friday, most of them true.
The bush pilot from Benambra on the Omeo high plains was a legend a long time before he died in his sleep last week — an exit so peaceful it seemed an unlikely end to a dangerous life.
Buckley looked like a pirate who’d misplaced his eye patch and parrot. He had a streak of mischief as wide as the Snowy River and took a lot of chances. But it turns out that underneath the blarney, the bulldust and the barnstorming antics, he knew exactly what he was doing.
This might come as a surprise to the few aviation officials who managed to outlive him after six decades spent trying to outwit him.
Part of the Buckley legend is that his pilot’s licence was cancelled a dozen times by “desk flyers” outraged at his casual attitude to the commendably strict regulations that govern aviation in Australia.
“The rules are more a rough guide up here,” he used to say, even to reporters he knew would publish his casual taunt. He couldn’t help poking the bear. Apart from extreme flying, goading authority was his favourite pastime.
He was a great one for stunts, although that’s not the only reason his name spread beyond East Gippsland, where he was such a local hero that 1970s school kids told to write essays about “a famous Australian” often chose Buckley.
The daredevil whose father nicknamed him “Ben” was born Pearse Edward Buckley in the Great Depression, one of a big family on a battling dairy farm near Balnarring. As a teenager he was milking cows in the mud and manure when a passing plane caught his eye.
“I’m going to do that,” he promised himself.
At 17, he went to New Zealand as a Government deer culler, shooting big tallies to pay for flying lessons. At 21, he had his pilot’s licence.
His first brush with authority was for landing a Tiger Moth in a paddock to buy fuel. Soon after moving to Benambra, he married his first wife, Merle, daughter of cattleman and horse trainer Mick Matthews.
As a pioneer “crop duster” in Victoria’s roughest and most remote country, Buckley became known from Yarram all the way to the border at Mallacoota and northwest through Buchan and Gelantipy to his adopted home near Omeo and beyond.
Two generations of Gippslanders grew up in awe of him, and hundreds knew him personally. I was one of them.
In Gippsland, apart from spraying crops on the flats, Buckley spread super phosphate on steep country where driving tractors was suicidal.
When I was a kid, he and his fellow pilot Bob Lansbury spread phosphate from “strips” scratched into hilltops on properties like ours, so rough that stock had to be mustered with horses and dogs.
These bush pilots had to dodge trees and powerlines, flying that required so much finesse that Buckley became notorious for sneaking planes under bridges and between trees.
He once landed an Airtruk ag plane, a machine as ugly as its name, on the Bairnsdale showgrounds, somehow dodging the pine trees at one end. Room was so tight he couldn’t take off again and had to get a truck to retrieve the aircraft.
The morning after a pub session with a Bass Strait oil rig chopper pilot, he won a bet by doing a “touch and go” landing with the Airtruk on the Esso helipad at Longford, to the shock of those working there. He lost his licence for that.
Buzzing a new bridge being built over the Snowy River at Orbost was a step too far. Workers terrified he was going to hit the bridge jumped off into the water. There was hell to pay over that.
It’s possible that stunt and a dozen others (bombing local footy games and picnic races with fertiliser or lollies was a favourite) forced him to go overseas to work in the mid-1970s. He’d say only that he was never actually convicted of flying under bridges.
Drought years and a downturn in farm economics meant that the agricultural aviation business was doing it tough, so it was a good time to let the heat die down at home. He sprayed cotton (and contracted malaria) on the Nile delta in Sudan and sprayed carrot crops on the Norfolk fens in England.
Buckley said he “totalled” only two aircraft. One, amazingly, he managed to stall in a tree top at Mt Baw Baw after the wings froze. He climbed down the tree wearing his helmet and walked out to where a passing driver stopped to ask where his motorbike had broken down.
The other mishap was in England, where his plane clipped a fence at low speed. He said later he’d overloaded it because he was hurrying to go to a party after work.
Then there was the time he was flying west of Omeo and saw the old Cobungra Station homestead on fire. He landed in a paddock next to the burning house, ran inside and rescued a valuable book he’d once been shown by the owner.
The scallywag stories are endless, but there was more to Ben Buckley than breaking rules for the hell of it. Buckley the sinner (he happened to be grandson of controversial English-born evangelist priest, C.H. Nash) was a saint when it mattered.
It mattered in 1964, when a Benambra farmer’s son, five-year-old Wayne Dyer, was run over and suffered serious head injuries.
Buckley flew the injured child to Albury, despite bad weather and the fact he would have to land after dark on a strip without landing lights, which was technically illegal. He called ahead, asking for cars to line the strip with headlights on. It saved the boy’s life.
In 1972, 50 years ago this June, a toddler named Ido Calvi escaped from his parents’ farmhouse at Lindenow, near Bairnsdale, and followed his father, Rodolfo, who was mowing a paddock with a tractor.
Rodolfo didn’t see Ido until too late. The mower cut off one of the little boy’s feet. The distraught father packed the foot in ice and rushed Ido to Bairnsdale hospital, 30km away.
The doctors said the foot couldn’t be saved. They wanted to stitch the stump. Rodolfo argued for an hour until they agreed to call microsurgeons in Melbourne. The experts said there was a 50-50 chance of saving Ido’s foot — but only if he were flown to St Vincent’s Hospital immediately.
There was no air ambulance. Rodolfo Calvi knew about Ben Buckley, who was staying in Bairnsdale that year. By chance, Buckley had just come inside for lunch when the phone rang.
Ten minutes later, he was refuelling his Piper Cherokee at Bairnsdale aerodrome. An ambulance backed up to the plane with its tiny patient, deathly pale from shock and blood loss. A nurse carried a container with Ido’s foot.
They hit bad weather in the LaTrobe Valley. Then came a radio message from Melbourne which horrified Rodolfo: the city’s airports were closed because of fog. Air control ordered Buckley to turn back.
He ignored the order. It was a mercy flight, he said. Fog or no fog, he was coming in. He demanded an ambulance be waiting at Essendon Airport, the closest to the city hospitals.
Flying by instinct, instruments and radio guidance, he headed for Essendon, approaching the invisible runway through a wall of fog. He pulled off a perfect landing.
By 3pm, Ido was unloaded at St Vincent’s. A team of microsurgeons operated all night. It was the first successful operation of its type, world wide.
When Rodolfo saw his son the next morning, he touched the little foot in wonder. It was pink again, the blood circulating through it. His eyes filled with tears.
“It is a miracle,” he said. Soon, Ido was home on the farm. Later, he could kick a football and dance. He got to live life to the full, as the now middle-aged father-of-two told me this week. He and his mother will be at the funeral on Friday.
The Calvis and Dyers are not the only families who revere Buckley. In early 1986, toddler Jodie Gilmore was snake bitten at Benambra. Because of her light body weight, she was in extreme danger. Buckley flew Jodie and her mother to Bairnsdale. On the way she became unconscious, and her mother feared she was dying, but she responded to treatment in hospital.
The flight, in a cropdusting plane, was technically illegal. So was one he did on November 4, 1986, when eight-year-old John Hunt suffered terrible injuries, including a fractured skull, when dragged more than a kilometre by a bolting horse on a remote farm north of Benambra.
Buckley broke the rules to land in a paddock to fly the boy to hospital. The boy’s father, a senior public servant, said he was “eternally grateful”.
Apart from “mercy dashes”, Buckley (and his flying partner Bob Lansbury) pioneered the use of fire bombing when they dropped fire retardant on a lightning strike near Benambra on February 6, 1967. It worked. Since then, hundreds of aircraft have tackled thousands of fires across Australia, but Ben and his mate did it first.
Behind the mischievous front, Buckley had a conscience. He was a local councillor for 29 of the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, when he retired aged 84.
All that time, he was a thorn in the side of local government, delighting ratepayers who kept voting him in, to the chagrin of some fellow councillors and most public servants.
As one reporter noted, “He’s been stood down, suspended, found guilty of misconduct, labelled a ‘maverick’, ‘pain in the neck’, ‘crusty old fart’ and even a ‘senile old prick’ by one former colleague.”
Only one thing pleased him more than to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That was to push the boundaries of aviation.
In 1999, aged 63, he took his tiny ultralight plane (powered by a motor often used in mowers and snowmobiles) and stowed five plastic containers of fuel into it, connected with a jerry rigged system of hoses. He took off at Mallacoota and headed out to sea.
Against the odds, not to mention aviation rules, he was flying to New Zealand on the one day when a predicted tailwind might let him get away with it. Exactly 11 hours and 11 minutes later, he landed at Haast on the South Island.
The authorities weren’t happy but pilots around the world applauded his nerve. Others have tried to replicate the feat but he was first.
The great Tasman crossing and many other adventures will get an airing at the service at Benambra footy ground on Friday. Hundreds of people will come to see him off, in cars and utes — and in planes, of course. They’ll land on the dry bed of Lake Omeo where Ben landed thousands of times.
Speakers will tell the best stories, although some might be saved for the relative privacy of the wake. Such as the one about how Buckley used to smuggle hundreds of crayfish from Flinders Island every week in the superphosphate hopper of a plane. His mates cooked the crays and sold them on the black market from Lakes Entrance to Melbourne.
Certain co-offenders, very respectable these days, will be among the mourners. Ben would have loved that.
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