There’s an old saying in Outback Australia: Any really good piece of equipment that never breaks down is said to be ‘a bit like Pat’s ax: It may have had two new heads and four new handles, but it’s the same ax!’ That description exactly fits an Auster J5 being restored near Brisbane, Australia — a war veteran spared from rotting in the tropical jungles of New Guinea.

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Perhaps the Allied equivalent of the Feiseler Fi.156 Storch, the Auster was legendary in the southwest Pacific, particularly in New Guinea during World War II. A single-engine STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft, it was used to deliver anything from spies to spare parts into grass paddocks that could hardly be described as airstrips.

In the years following the war, Austers were among the aircraft that rebuilt the territory of New Guinea, and Australian-registered KSK was at the front line. At its controls was the first woman to earn a commercial pilot’s license in that hard country, Pat Graham. In fact, in the early 1950s, she was likely among only a handful of full-time female commercial pilots in the world. Now barely 70, she looks back on her work for Gibbes Sepik Airways with a laugh: ‘Oh, flying in New Guinea in the ’50s was a lot of fun. We worked hard, and we played hard and flew seven days a week. We operated mostly into one-way strips. You only got one go at it because you couldn’t go ’round. So you had to be pretty spot-on with your approaches. You know, a patrol officer would walk in and select what he thought was a reasonable site for a strip, and get all the natives to cut the grass. They’d stamp it down a bit, and then one of us would go in and land on it!’

Starting her professional life as a hairdresser, Graham battled male chauvinism as well as split ends, eventually scraping together enough money to gain a commercial license in Australia. Once she soloed, she discovered aviation Down Under apparently didn’t have room for a woman. But Royal Australian Air Force Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk ace Bobby Gibbes did in his bush airline. So Graham headed north to fly over the jungles and mountains of the Sepik Delta and western highlands.

Gibbes’ time in Africa’s Western Desert had taught him the need for sturdy aircraft, and he established his bush airline with single-engine, high-wing Noorduyn Norseman and Auster types. If the aircraft were tough types, so were the men who flew them. Some were less than impressed with ‘that flying girl,’ as she became known throughout the highlands. Many wondered why the owner of Sepik Airways had gambled on a 22-year-old girl who had only recently gained her B Class (commercial) license, had minimal hours in her logbook and had never before seen New Guinea. One former colleague described his first impressions of her as ‘a slip of a girl with’shiny wings’ and only a few hours, getting her aerial baptism over some of the toughest flying country in the world.’

Old hands tagged the clouds over New Guinea’s western highlands ‘The Chocolate Box Clouds’ — they never knew which had hard centers. An article in a 1950s edition of Goodyear magazine noted: ‘Here are mountains towering 9,000 feet into the steaming tropical cloud base. The airstrips are short, too short always, and the approach is never direct, or into the wind, but all too often a sudden, sliding turn around the edge of the mountain. One must get down the first time and then unload quickly and get what’s going back and up and away before the afternoon cloud closes down on the top and there’s no getting out before tomorrow.’ In the 50 years that have passed since that time, I’ve spent enough time flying RAAF de Havilland Caribou transports in those same mountains to know that nothing has changed.

The first aircraft under Graham’s command was an Auster. As Pat recalled, her career almost crashed on takeoff: ‘I’d only been in Port Moresby two weeks when Marinus Zuydam, the chief pilot, said he had to go through to Wewak to change over an aircraft and would I like to go. I said, ‘Yeah, sure, how long are we going for?’ He said, ‘Oh, a couple of nights.’ So, not knowing New Guinea, I packed a weekend bag — and I got back to Port Moresby 18 months later! We arrived in Wewak and were asked if we could do a trip to Angorum that afternoon, which we did. But we lost an engine, just ran out of noise. It took us 10 minutes to get to where we landed and 10 hours to walk back.’

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