By Tony Wright
The citizens of the twin cities were in a frenzy.
Hundreds of cars revved up, heading to the airport. Traffic soon snarled the streets and the main roads.
The Air France Concorde departs Kingsford Smith Airport on August 22, 1987.Credit: Philip Wayne Lock
Even the Hume Highway, which in those days was just another street snaking through built-up areas, was clogged with snorting, stationary trucks in both directions.
Everyone was in a whirl to witness the world’s sexiest passenger plane, the Concorde, make an emergency landing at Albury airport.
It is difficult to imagine now, but in the 1970s, Australia was wide-eyed with excitement about the promise of supersonic air travel that would have us leaving Melbourne or Sydney at breakfast and landing in London (local time) for a late lunch.
The whole trip of 13 hours, including refuelling stops and, the publicity promised, chicken satay in Singapore, would involve just 10 hours in the air.
Dream machine of the 1970s. A Concorde jet first flew to Australia in June, 1972, landing in Sydney.Credit: Trevor Dallen
It wasn’t entirely inconceivable.
Qantas had held options since the 1960s to buy four supersonic Concorde jets.
In 1970, the Australian airline laid down $600,000 for six Boeing 2707 jets, the United States’ idea of a competitor to Concorde.
It all came to nought. Concorde built only 20 planes, and British Airways and Air France snaffled the lot. The Boeing 2707 never got off the ground.
But in 1979, Albury-Wodonga’s Radio 2AY broke into its morning schedule with astounding news.
A popular disc jockey named Laurie Henry announced a Concorde was making an unheralded test flight to Australia and, shock horror, it had struck engine problems and had to make an emergency landing.
Albury’s airport had the only suitable runway, he reported.
Henry kept the citizens of the twin cities and surrounding districts in thrall throughout the breakfast hour, tracking the plane as it made a turn over Alice Springs, his commentary becoming ever more breathless as the stricken plane screamed towards the Upper Murray, a sonic boom rolling in its wake.
The Concorde lands in Australia. But it was in Sydney, not Albury, and it was June 17, 1972, not April Fools Day, 1979.Credit: Alan Purcell
Soon, Albury’s little airport was crammed with spectators in a high state of agitation, and police were at their wits’ end about how to sort out the increasing traffic chaos.
It took a while for the penny to drop.
It was April 1.
Slowly, the April Fools at the airport and those stuck on the gridlocked roads dispersed, though it was reported that one hopeful was still at the airfield scanning the sky for a Concorde as night fell.
Concorde’s 002 prototype in Melbourne in 1972.Credit: Neville Bowler
Laurie Henry was threatened with arrest for causing a public nuisance, but no police sergeant seemed keen to be remembered for jailing a local hero for pulling off the most spectacularly successful April Fool’s stunt in memory; one that would cause mirth for decades.
Tragically, Henry the merry jester died of a heart attack, aged 35, less than a year later, in March 1980.
It came back to me when I awoke on Tuesday this week to the intelligence, announced with mournful gravitas, that one of my daughters had crashed her car into my parked motorcycle in the garage downstairs, causing grievous damage.
“April Fool,” cried my little family in high good humour as I leapt from bed.
My instant hit of relief, according to some psychologists, is the reason why April Fool jokes are actually good for us. The realisation that impending disaster was simply a good-natured prank causes a rush of endorphins, the feel-good, natural drug that makes you feel better and sets you up for a positive morning.
No one is sure how the jolly ritual of April Fool’s Day began. It’s been around since the 16th century (at least) and is observed in countries across the world.
One widely retailed suggestion is it began in France in 1564 when Charles IX decreed that the new year would be celebrated on January 1, and would no longer begin at Christmas, on March 1, or March 25, or at Easter, depending on which French diocese was doing the (mis)calculation.
Those who failed to observe the new date and stuck with Easter – a moveable feast usually in April – were thus known as April Fools.
Another version concerns “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales of 1392 in which the cock, Chanticleer, is tricked by a fox “since March began, full thirty days and two”. Since March has 31 days, “thirty days and two” would make April 1 the date the rooster was fooled.
Whatever its origins, April 1 exists to remind us, usually harmlessly and with a chuckle, that we are all capable of being fooled.
The great and most predatory con artists, unfortunately, have always known it, too, minus the harmless chuckle.
“There’s a sucker born every minute,” the 19th-century American showman and charlatan P. T. Barnum is supposed to have chortled.
All those who believe Barnum actually said this have almost certainly been fooled themselves.
He didn’t come up with the phrase – versions of it were around before Barnum began conning the crowds – and the word “sucker” apparently wasn’t used in his time.
Whoever was the author, however, it neatly sums up a universal truth that has become wretchedly obvious in this age of social media, misinformation and fake news.
Gullibility, once a slightly attractive quality implying innocence and guilelessness, now puts the unsophisticated in danger.
Gullibility is valuable currency to cynics, swindlers, scammers and bottom-feeders.
It can be exploited to the point it is capable of electing a fraud as president of the United States, removing the United Kingdom from Europe on a pack of lies, or simply erasing the contents of your bank account with a phone call.
At the depths, gullible parents swallow the nonsense of anti-vaxxers, all the way up to the most senior health official in the US government, Robert F. Kennedy, and children die from measles – a disease previously eradicated from developed countries like the US and Australia.
Darkling thoughts.
Better to recall the better April Fool’s tricks designed to tease the gullible with happy endorphins, rather than sickening post-scam adrenaline.
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