I know exactly what I was doing on the morning of January 17, 1958, at least at one stage. I was hand-pumping water from our household well, water for the wash-house (we never called it a laundry – that would have been altogether too fancy). It was a warm Friday in the school holidays.
I saw a Royal Australian Air Force DC3 pass overhead, flying east, and I saw a white trail coming from the starboard engine. I ran inside to tell everyone but no-one believed me. They were not terribly interested but as I went back to the pump I heard that same plane coming back. The engine note was quite distinctive and we all watched planes back then.
This time there was a white stream from the port engine and the propeller on the starboard engine was not turning. I ran back inside and, again, the family seemed to think I was making something up. That was quite annoying.

The bush telegraph soon told us that the plane had come down near Garfield (I felt a certain self-righteousness) and the next day my brother, a RAAF driver, told us he was part of a team coming out to collect the plane and take it back to Laverton.
We went down to have a look, and here my memory seems to fail me. I thought the plane was in a paddock just south of the Longwarry Rd, nearer Tynong than Garfield.
The pilot was Flight-Lieutenant L A Evans, stationed at Laverton, and luckily he had experience of landing 'wheels up'. In wartime he had belly-landed a Lincoln bomber at Townsville. The Dakota (also known as a DC3 or a C47) had been fine when Evans ran up the motors and turned onto the Laverton runway. The Dakota was a very modern aircraft when it was introduced, and it was very, very tough structurally.
Evans took off into a clear blue sky for what was to be a really routine run - except that it wasn't.
The flight left from Laverton for East Sale to take an ARDU scientist up there, a bloke called W. Rice. ARDU stands for Australian Research and Development Unit.
There were RAAF Cadets in camp at Laverton and this seemed a great chance for them to get some flight experience. The 25 cadets were in for an experience that no-one could have planned. The incident is comfortably in the past now, but it could have very easily been a disaster.
Flt/Lieut Evans said that he lost his starboard engine when about half-way to East Sale so he turned back, heading for Moorabbin, The port engine then packed up and Evans knew the plane was going to meet the earth in a fashion for which it was not built. There were four RAAF crew aboard, Besides the pilot there were Warrant Officer F. Russell, Sergeant W.R. Ross, Aircraftsman G.F. Green. All four, and Mr Rice, with the 25 cadets, simply had to sit there as the plane slowly dropped out of the sky and everything was left in the pilot's hands.
As the plane started its one-way descent Evans was looking for somewhere flat and unobstructed, and he saw a paddock that looked large enough and flat enough and turned his plane, now just an over-heavy glider, onto a path toward it. The paddock was owned by Edward Walters but a Patricia Terrill, then 16 years old, said it barely missed the Terrill house.
The crash-landing was almost uneventful' though one breathless report said "The plane blazed a shallow furrow in the hard ground before it finally came to rest in a great cloud of dust only 80 feet from a road which had high tension power lines along its edge."
I'm not sure how you "blaze a furrow," but let it pass.
It could have been far worse if the pilot had been any less competent. He was not in a position to make many choices, but the fact that he brushed through some cypress trees on his approach suggests that he was trying to keep it all low and slow because away in front of him there was a steep bank, with trees, and there were high-tension power lines there as well.
The plane bumped its way across the ground, through a fence and stopped after about 450 metres, about 80 metres short of the bank. It was a fine bit of flying because Evans with no engines, had to get it right first time, and he did.
Ken Sumsion, then a 15-year-old cadet said "The Dakota glided towards the ground smoothly and silently. For a moment time stood still."
"Contact with the tops of the Cyprus trees was slight and didn't bother me. Contact with ground, wheels up was smooth too. "Sliding along the ground for about 500 metres, there was a bit of clattering as we demolished a post and wire fence. I saw bits of it whizz past the window."
"We missed everything that mattered – the road, the ditch, the pine trees, the house, the concrete water tower and the 22 kilovolt power lines. It was quite eerie after the dust blew away – quiet and peaceful.".
He also said "Not long after turning back, a cadet who had been up front with the flight crew came out and very calmly told us we were about to make an emergency forced landing and to fasten our seat belts.
"I suddenly discovered that my seat belt had no buckle and I just had to hang on grimly to the conduit armrest next to my seat.
"There was no sign of panic or stress at any stage; it was all happening so very fast.
"However, looking down at my hands, I vividly remember that my knuckles had turned a whiter shade of pale.
Ken recently came back to Garfield to revisit the site.
The plane was A65-99 to the Air Force when it joined in 1945, and it was moved hither and yon in the post-war years before coming to Laverton. After the crash the plane was deemed beyond repair, but in 1960 it was rebuilt and became VH-PNA 'Mount Victoria; flown by Papuan Air Transport, and it was then bought by Ansett Airlines of Papua New Guinea, but in 1972 it flew its last and was finally scrapped at Madang.