Victims mourned on 65-year anniversary of TAA Fokker F-27 Friendship tragedy
After 65 years, the night Audrey Camilleri lost her brother in Queensland’s worst commercial air disaster is still fresh in her mind — but she fears the story will be forgotten in time.
More than half a century on from one of Mackay’s greatest tragedies and the day still feel fresh in the mind of those who lost their loved ones on that fateful day.
Over 100 people gathered at the Illawong beach on Tuesday to mark 65 years since the Fokker Friendship Abel Tasman crashed off the coast of Mackay claiming the lives of all 29 on board.
Among the crowd was Karen Kelly whose father Keith Van De Velde perished in the crash when she was just four years old while she was living in Brisbane with her mum.
“I kept asking my grandmother all the time, is dad on that plane? Is dad on that plane? And one day when we were out in the yard, she grabbed me and took me by the arm and said, ‘your father’s dead and he’s never coming back’. And that was it.
“All my life I have been missing him.”
Ms Kelly’s relationship with her mum was never the same as a result of the crash, but it didn’t stop her from overcoming her own demons to make the mammoth trip to Mackay from Perth with her grandson.
But before boarding the stop over flight from Brisbane, Ms Kelly’s seat was changed to row six, the same allocation her father was given on the Abel Tasman.
“She said ‘we can change you to row six’, so I said you can but I’m not going in that seat.
“I needed the window seat to see at night time what I could see when they were coming in, even if there wasn’t any fog.
“I can now go home knowing that I’ve done it.” she said.
On the night her brother was due to arrive for the Queen’s birthday long weekend, Audrey Camilleri and her mum noticed a plane circling the skies above her house on Nebo Road in Mackay.
“She was on the veranda and she said this plane has been circling around for so long,” she said.
With her sister already at the airport waiting for the Fokker F-27 Friendship to touch down, Ms Camilleri and her mum decided to chase her brother’s plane through the foggy streets to where her sister waited with the other nervous families.
“The TAA (Trans Australia Airlines) people came over and they said ‘We’ve lost contact. We just don’t know where the plane is’.
“Then we heard that it must’ve crashed … I thought they might have landed somewhere, we didn’t ever expect that to happen.”
Fifteen-year-old Edgar Dowse was one of 29 people on board the Abel Tasman on route to Mackay from Rockhampton when it crashed off the coast of Mackay on June 10, 1960 taking the lives of everyone on board.
The night is “still very fresh” in the mind of Ms Camilleri, who was only 23 at the time her younger brother died, but she’s scared younger generations don’t even know what happened.
“It was pretty sad for the simple reason my sister Tyra got married in April, I got married in May and then we lost Edgar in June,” she said.
“It was a pretty hollow household.”
The surviving families have renewed calls for a more fitting memorial honouring the four crew members and 24 passengers who lost their lives.
“In 10 years time a lot of the brothers and sisters won’t be alive neither,” she said.
“People say ‘well I wonder what happened?’ you know? So if they had a little plaque or something to have a little story about what happened and why are those names there.”
The Fokker Friendship Memorial at Illawong Beach has since become a focal point for Ms Camilleri and victim’s family members who, like her, have carried the flame of one of Australia’s worst aviation tragedies.
Mackay RSL Sub Branch Senior Vice President Col Benson was 14 at the time and had known Mr Dowse as a young boy.
He said context was needed for the memorial site which had too often gone unnoticed in the memorial gardens.
“People come and have a look at it and yes there’s a list of 29 names on the bronze plaque but there’s no story behind it. It’s certainly needed,” he said.
Victims of the crash included nine boarders, a 21-year-old Rockhampton Grammar teacher, cyclists coming up from Maryborough for a biking event and other local Mackay residents.
It remains as Australia’s worst commercial aviation crash and resulted in recorders, or ‘black boxes’, being mandatory on all commercial aircrafts.
Mr Dowse would have been 80-years-old this year and Ms Camilleri and her sister Tyra Wales frequently fit a visit to the Illawong memorial.
“We always go down to the cairn on the day,” she said.
“The first few years my mother and I went down every week but now I go down once a month and just clean up the cairn a little bit and make sure the flowers are nice.”
Guest speakers at the event included the Head of Boarders from The Rockhampton Grammar School and the son of Rod Manning, the then Daily Mercury journalist and later editor who was supposed to interview the US Consul to Queensland arriving in Mackay on the ill-fated plane.
Mackay Regional Council has been contacted to ask if it would be willing to build an additional plaque sharing the story of the crash for future generations.
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Originally published as Victims mourned on 65-year anniversary of TAA Fokker F-27 Friendship tragedy
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