On our way to visit our good friends K and Miss P last week for a catchup, Tiggy and I stopped at the Bankstown Aviation Museum. As you do. I hadn’t even known that the museum was there until K and her partner moved out this way and we started travelling past it.
It’s a small parcel of land on the fringes of Bankstown airport, with several sheds and buildings clustering together. Outside, it’s a bit JG Ballard, with a ghostly fleet of decrepit and skeletal aircraft in various states of repair — a few DC3s, a MiG-15 two-seater trainer, and an English Electric Canberra drooping on its suspension, among others. Tail sections are damaged, oil streaks engine nacelles, and engines themselves are absent, leaving tangles of raw cables to swing in the wind. In a hangar are some better kept aircraft, including a Dassault Mirage.
While I definitely had a fascination for this odd place, I thought that Tiggy would enjoy it as well, and she did, running up to the sides of the fuselages as wind whistled through small gaps in flaps and communications wires, knocking on the sheet metal and saying ‘No one in this one!’ or ‘Fix this one with a SCREW!’. And there was something quite extraordinary about watching this tiny girl cavort beside the grass-hemmed, rusting bodies.
