The Douglas DC-3 now known to us as VH-ANR has carried many VIPs during her thirty-seven years of service. We know of some of them, for example, Lieutenant-Governor-General of the Netherlands East Indies Dr. Van Mook, General Douglas MacArthur and Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. There will be many more that we don't know about - yet.

Just recently we learned that another famous Australian was one of her passengers. For this we have to thank researcher Philip van Dueren who decided to put his Covid isolation to good use by transcribing the diaries of famous Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, an ordeal of interpretation that has defeated previous researchers! Sir Hubert's papers are held by the Ohio State University in Columbus, USA and amongst them is a passport containing a visa that shows that Sir Hubert arrived in Batavia, Netherlands East Indies on 2 August 1941. More significantly, the visa also records how Sir Hubert arrived in Batavia. He is shown as having arrived on "PK-ALW" which is the registration carried by QAM's DC-3 when she was serving with KNILM in the NEI.

One might imagine that there would not be much to interest the famed Arctic explorer in that part of the world in 1941 so it is reasonable to wonder what he was doing there. Philip van Dueren has established that Wilkins had arrived in Yokohama, Japan ostensibly on an "economic survey" although some speculated that it might have been a spying mission on behalf of the U.S. government. His travels took him to China, Hong Kong, Rangoon, Bangkok, Malaya and Singapore from where he joined PK-ALW for his flight to Batavia. While Wilkins was in Singapore, biographer Simon Nasht, in his book The Last Explorer, records that Wilkins met up with an old acquaintance, the Japanese Consul General, over drinks at the Raffles Hotel. After several drinks, the Consul General divulged to Wilkins that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941, apparently confident that if Wilkins reported this to anyone he would not be believed.

Events unfolded rapidly and less than a year later, on 7 March 1942, DC-3 PK-ALW was the last civil aircraft to depart the NEI in advance of the Japanese invasion.

The following scans of Sir Hubert Wilkins' passport are courtesy of the Ohio State University. It is noteworthy that Sir Hubert declares his profession simply as "Science". After his visa for the NEI, the next visa indicates that Wilkins arrived in Australia on 16 September 1941 and that he was destined for the United States, perhaps to deliver a report along the lines; "You're not going to believe this but ..."