TINA LAWTON .... continued
At the end of 1968, as winter approached, Tina accepted an invitation from an old Adelaide friend, Graham Wright, to spend Christmas in Kenya. Wright was working in Africa as a free-lance pilot and was able to arrange a free return flight for her on a charter aircraft. The only condition he put on her accepting his offer was: “bring your guitar and sing for your supper!”
 She arrived in Nairobi on 22 December and, after spending the weekend in Mombasa, she, Graham Wright and his friend Chris Paul, flew out of Nairobi en route to Lake Baringo where they planned to spend Christmas. They never arrived, the small Comanche aircraft in which they travelled crashing into the crater of Mount Longonot soon after take-off. The wreckage was not discovered until several days later and, on December 28th, a rescue party climbed into the crater and located the bodies of the three victims. The nature of the terrain made recovery impossible and a decision was made to bury them in shallow graves on the crater floor. The Accident Investigation Report concluded that, flying inside the crater, the pilot had been blinded as he banked directly into the rays of the setting sun.
A memorial service was held in St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Nairobi, on Friday 17thJanuary 1969 and, later, a stone memorial cairn was erected on the rim of the crater. In Adelaide, her death was the lead story in the Advertiser (30th December 1968), a new organ was dedicated to her memory in the family's church and an exhibition of her drawings, graphics and oil paintings was mounted at the Bonython Gallery in North Adelaide the following year.
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Concluding Note:
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In 1974, Tina's mother Kathleen published a small paperback, The Singing Bird: Tina Lawton's Story (Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide), a beautiful and moving memoir that is now long out of print and difficult to find. It placed the disparate newspaper references etc. into a more personal context and enabled me to gain a much fuller picture of her short life. My sincere thanks go to Grahame Clark for drawing this book to my attention. Thanks also to Zbig Nowara and Jim & Valda Low for providing valuable information.
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This article was first published in The Australian Music Museum #23, August 2001. AMM is a journal devoted to documenting the artists and recordings of the Australian music industry. A subscription is A$9 for 3 issues posted and can be obtained from:
The Editor, Australian Music Museum, PO Box 5, Golden Square, Victoria 3555.
For further information email: moonlight@impulse.net.au
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