My father worked for the Shell Oil Company in Seria, Brunei. He was sent there only a couple of weeks after the Japanese surrender in WWII to help get the oilfield back into production. Eventually my mother and I (as a 20 month old baby) joined him.

Shell established a school in 1948 but it was only geared to take pupils up to the age of about 10 years of age. I started attending the school when I turned five in 1949 and in due course had to leave in 1954. My parents were New Zealanders so I was sent to boarding school in Wellington where my mother had family who acted as my guardians.

It was Shell's policy to fly children who were at boarding school from wherever they were back to Seria for the annual long school holidays (about June / July for those in the Northern Hemisphere). In my case it was at Christmas and normally I would leave New Zealand early in December and return mid or late February the next year.

My route was normally Christchurch or Auckland, New Zealand to Sydney where I mostly had an overnight stay, then the next morning I would board a Qantas Douglas Dc-4 for the flight from Sydney to Singapore via Darwin. (I recall two trips deviating before getting to Darwin by landing briefly at Cloncurry and Longreach - both of those stops were in the middle of the night and we were allowed out of the aircraft to stretch our legs. I remember to this day the blast furnace wave of heat that met me).

Those were long, long boring trips with sometimes an overnight stay in Darwin at the then Qantas rest house, before continuing on the next morning. An overnight stay in Singapore then an early morning start to Labuan on a Malayan Airlines Douglas DC-3. On arrival it was only a short hop from Labuan to the Seria oilfield airstrip in the company's Percival Prince.

Now to the reason for my writing this account. I had occasion today to dig out my old passport which covered some of those trips and when looking for something else I saw the entries you see below, on my passport.

The Darwin Customs stamp for 10 December 1957 notes that the aircraft's registration was 'VH-EBP'. This was not written by me, so it must have been the duty Customs Officer. There is also the Labuan Immigration Officer's entry stamp for the same day and the Brunei Immigration Officer stamp permitting me to land on the same day.

I flew this route just once and I can only remember bits and pieces. I had turned thirteen the previous October.

I strongly suspect I had stayed in the Qantas Rest House the night before because the whole flight from Darwin to Labuan was in daylight. It was a beautiful day and I can remember looking out the window from time-to-time as we passed over Timor, the Indobesian Islands, the Celebes Islands and seeing the surf on the lovely beaches and the jungle clad landscape before the final leg over Borneo's jungle. All of this was flown at probably no more than 10,000 feet.

Your interior photograph of VH-EBP shows the windows covered in mesh to protect them from shifting cargo, but I don't recall them on my flight, certainly not over the window I was looking out. If my memory is correct I was sitting on the starboard side about a third of the way aft from the cockpit. Your picture shows just two seats but on my flight I'm sure there were a good 8 to 10 passengers, possibly 12, all up near the cockpit end. There were other passengers, perhaps five or six including myself. I remember the large vacant cargo area to the rear - yes there was hardly any cargo on board, in fact I don't remember any cargo at all!

My last memory is that I and two or three of the passengers went a bit silly by moving to the vacant cargo area and throwing small pillows at each other - as each seat had a pillow to help rest your neck or head. We gave up pretty quickly because our antics caused the aircraft to gently move around so we soon felt sick.

 

Perry Harlen, New Zealand. May 2012