Spitfire Museum - Unley Park

You never know what you might find in a backyard shed. Langdon Badger regularly checks on one of the nation's greatest war treasures, the only fully restored Royal Australian Airforce Spitfire in the country and here it sits in a quiet street in Unley Park. It looked very different when he found it on Goodenough Island, off the coast of New Guinea nearly thirty years ago.

"Well it was pretty rough actually, you can see a picture of it broken up into components and lying with lots of other aircraft in a disposal because the war had moved on and the aeroplanes that couldn't be flown out were just left behind"

She'd been badly damaged on landing, one of several brushes with death for its pilot Sergeant Alec Chomley seen here trying to escape the oppressive heat while maintaining a sense of decorum in the jungles of New Guinea. For these young men, many of whom were in their late teens and early twenties, there was a certain romance about the Spitfire, but as the missions continued so too did the casualties.

"Well the average life of a Spitfire and a Jeep and I guess a lot of other things was only fifty hours, this particular aircraft nearly made fifty hours before it crashed"

For Langdon one of the real joys of this thirty year restoration project has been the close friendship he developed with the pilot of this sleak machine. He found the serial number inside the plane and by scouring the records of the relevant Commonwealth Department, Langdon tracked Sergeant Chomley down to a house in Geelong and from there began a special bond.

"I've taken Sergeant pilot Alec Chomley back there with his wife and he was quite amazed. He even was able to identify and speak to some of the natives on the island and they reminisced about old times"

Spitfires usually stayed in the air for only forty five minutes, enough to go up and attack enemy aircraft or sea and land targets and return to base. And in those short flights Alec Chomley packed in more terror than most of us do in a lifetime having crashed a Spitfire three times including one flight for which he received this Caterpilla Club Certificate after bailing out north of New Britain.

"He was very lucky because he was rescued by the American Destroyer SS Stockton which was a long way from him and it was just a sheer miracle that the man in the crows nest saw him and the destroyer came to him and picked him up and the captain said "would you like a brandy' ­ and he said no, it's too early in the morning and the captain said you must say yes because this is a dry ship and if we open a bottle we can all drink it"

And if you've sighed in despair at modern day beaurocracy then consider Alec Chomley and the letters which flowed from his parachute flight into the sea.

"And he's looking down and the seas coming up and he thinks he's not going to be able to swim very well with these boots and so he dropped them and uh, it was two years after the war before the government stopped sending him accounts for these very valuable lost boots ­ he should have died and they wouldn't have bothered him"

Sadly Langdon's mate Alec Chomley died last month, but his wartime stories live on in a shed in Unley Park. You can visit it next Saturday, Remembrance Day from 10am until midday. The five dollar entrance fee will assist the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Spitfire Museum: 21 Whistler Ave, Unley Park.

For more information, email info@postcards-sa.com.au