A woman from the audience, and another whose name I didn't get, told this one about the last National Folk Festival in Alice Springs, which was in 1987. .

“ I decided to do the musicians tour to Alice Springs and do the fourteen day tour up to Alice Springs and back through the Ranges. Anyhow, going into the city to catch the bus out to the airport, there was a fire in the main street. And I realised that the bus wasn't going to get me to the airport in time, so I hopped in a taxi. 'Course the taxi was held up as well.

When we got out to the airport, I had my accordion case with my luggage and went to check in and they said, “We're sorry, but you're too late for this flight.” I said, “No, I've got to be on this flight, it's a fixed airfare. I must be on that flight. I can't go on any other flight.” And they said, “Just hold on a minute. They've taken the normal ramp away, but the crew ramp is still there. If you run up to gate “whatever-it-was”, we'll let you on. But you've only got a few moments to get there. And they wouldn't let me put my trolley with my luggage through. I had to take it all with me. So, I've got my handbag and my camera bag and my accordion case and all my luggage and I had to run clutching it all. And I'm running. And you go up the stairs, and down this long, long corridor to the gate and my nicker elastic broke, didn't it?! So, I'm now hanging on to everything and I'm still running and my nickers begin to drop and I'm pulling them up again and still trying to hold on to everything and still running and eventually, gasping for air, I got to the gate.

Breathless and still clutching everything I said, “I've got to get on the plane” and the man said “Well you can't. The flight's closed” and I said, still puffing and breathless, “But the man at the check-in said, if I run and get down here as fast as I could, you'd let me on the plane and I've run!” And the man said, “Well, you stop here and I'll do the running and you just walk down here and follow me. Of course he took off, so I took off after him, don't I? And my nickers are getting further down aren't they? And then he came back and took all my luggage off me. By the time I got on the plane, they had sold my ticket to someone else, so they put me in First Class and the first thing they did was bring me a brandy because they thought I was going to have a hear attack!!”




I know exactly what she means. I think Martyn Wyndham-Read probably still dines out on the time I took him to the airport in Adelaide to get the Alice Springs flight. And there he was running out across the tarmac clutching all his gear including two guitar cases yelling, “Wait for me!!” As they began to push the stairways away from the plane, ready for it to taxi out to take off.

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