Dick Smith - My Adventurous Life

First published in 2021

Copyright Dick Smith 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web:www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 889 4

eISBN 978 1 76106 325 1

Map by Will Pringle

Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Front cover photograph: Rob Tuckwell

Cover design: Philip Campbell Design

To view the documentaries and read the publications that cover many of my adventures, please go to www.dicksmithadventure.com.au

For my grandchildren

It was the longest, most awful night we had ever experiencedand as the hours ticked by we realised that what wed first suspected was undeniably truegoods worth tens of thousands of dollars had been stolen from us. Even so, we still didnt want to believe it. We went through all the invoices again, checking them against stock that wasnt there. There had to be some explanation for the deficiencybut finally we had to admit that there was only one: wed been robbedand what made it worse, it had been done by a person we trusted.

It was my own fault. Id given in to the temptation to diversify the two-way radio business Id started three years earlier to include selling electronic components. I shouldve remained with something I knew. But I was over-confidentand this was to teach me a lesson Id never forget.

I was twenty-seven years old. My wife, Pip, and I had worked fantastically hard to get the business going. The company had just seemed to grow by itself. Id had no real ambitions beyond employing two or three people, and earning maybe $200 a week by the time I was in my early thirties. Wed given ourselves two years to get the business off the ground; if it failed, we wouldve tried something else.

But now, with this crisis, it looked as if we were about to lose everything.

We had a baby on the way, we were trying to save enough money to buy a houseand now, suddenly, we had debts we didnt believe we could ever repay. It was the blackest day of our lives. Wed found ourselves in a tunnel that we couldnt see any way out of.

My first memories are of living in Dudley Avenue, Roseville, a northern suburb of Sydney. Just next door, a small creek wound through a vacant block of land covered in gum trees and thick scrub. From as young as four, I would disappear into the bush. One day I discovered the entrance to a stormwater drain that emptied into Middle Harbour. As I crawled upstream in the darkness, the pipe got smaller and smaller, until it was barely big enough to squeeze through, but this did not stop me. After making my way about half a kilometre up the drain, I ended up under someones backyard. Peering out of the pipe, I spotted a woman having a cup of tea in her garden. Hello, I said.

The poor woman shrieked and dropped her cup. I quickly retreated, and they never found out who was there.

I always loved drain crawling as a kid. When my mother heard about these forays, she became quite worried and wrote to Council to have bars put on the drain; she never discovered that I could still squeeze my way in. Later, when I saw how anxious she was over my disappearances, I tried to reassure her by saying, Dont worry, Ill always turn up. Decades later, when I was on my solo flight around the world, she would remember my words and quote them when the media asked her if she was concerned for my safety.

I loved that block of bushland. Sometimes I would sit quietly without moving, just watching nature all around me. I never felt lonely or threatened. Often when I came back home, Mum would see that I had a clasped hand and would gradually pry it open, asking, What do you have there? She would have been dreading it was a deadly funnel-web or even a red-back spider; but even then I had common sense and it would be a beautiful little lizard or a frog.

Although I didnt notice it at the time, there must have been sadness in our household. I was born on 18 March 1944, at the height of World War II, and already my family had endured two war deaths. My mothers brother, Harold, was killed during the siege of Tobruk. He was my grandfathers only son after five daughters and his death nearly destroyed my grandpa. Two years later, my aunty Rainbows husband was killed on the HMAS Hobart when it was hit by a Japanese torpedo.

My dad was in the army, and a month before I was born he was transferred to Townsville for training, before being sent to New Guinea. He was fighting in Bougainville when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, but he didnt get home until December.

My mum told me a wonderful story of how he rang from Roseville railway station before walking the fifteen minutes to our house. As he approached in his uniform, my mum, Joan was standing at the top of the front steps with my sister Barbara and me. I was eighteen months old and took one look at him, then started screaming and ran down the hall and hid in our old dining room, which was stacked with furniture and difficult to access. It was more than half an hour before I could be enticed out to meet this strange man.

Within months, Dad was discharged from the army and returned to his job as a salesman at Murdochs department store, but not for long. He later told me that he wasnt happy at the job. To sell blankets, he was coached to hold the blanket up and stoop down behind it to make it look longer than it was. He didnt think this was ethical, and Dad was a very honest personeven though our family took pride in being descended from not one but five convicts, including one from the First Fleet.

After he left Murdochs, he found a job as a travelling book salesman for Leuteneggers Book Distributors. Mum was a housewife, but she earned a few extra pounds doing casual work for my grandfather, who lived opposite us. My grandpa, Harold Cazneaux, was a commercial photographer, and quite famous. Today his best works are held in the National Library.

Grandpa Cazs house was divided into living quarters on one side and his photographic business on the other. In the attic, my mother would retouch photos. In one of the bedrooms that had been turned into a darkroom, I would often stand beside Grandpa as he placed photographic paper into the developer tray and watch as enlargements would magically appear. I was fascinated by the process.

From the darkroom, a passageway led to a small studio attached to the east side of the house. Here the elite of Australian society would come to have their wedding photos taken, often wandering out among the fruit trees and gardens in the backyard, where I loved to play. There was even a hidden tap to turn on a fountain.

But, of all the rooms in my grandpas house, the one that had the greatest impact on my life was my uncle Harolds room. I must not have been more than five, and bored, when my grandma said, Would you like to look in Harolds room? She led me to a semi-detached room at the back of the house, which had been locked up and left since they got the terrible news that Harold had been killed. Even his bed had been left made up.