Of course I knew everything about the space race. The Reds hit the moon with a dead-eye dead-reckoning rocket, and the Yanks—while their own rockets continued to providing awesome images as they blew up on the launch pad—assured us we should be terrified that the bad guys were winning by such a large margin. Meanwhile Walt Disney, Wily Ley and Eric Von Braun kept me appraised of the progress and thrilled me with their predictions of how the future of space exploration would go.
There were other matters too that would have vital impact on my future but of which at the time my awareness was at best slight. They decided to build an international airport in the fields north of Melbourne at a place called Tullamarine which would be finished by 1970, just in time for the first lunar airliners to land there.
I thought Thor Heyerdahl and his mob on the Kon-Tiki the silliest bunch of wackers of my admittedly limited experience—like a bunch of Gingers and Algys without a Biggles in sight. After all, how interesting could drifting around the Pacific on a raft be? Not very, I reckoned. They did a lot of fishing which I had always found boring. Then comes the really exciting bit (at last) when they get stranded on a reef… Until the tide comes along and floats them off again. I remember it rather more for its historical connotations than as an adventure. Maybe I would grow up one day after all.
