16,900,000 meals for 9,000 men in jungle camps, 1250 miles from supply port

 

The following article is taken from the book "Bougainville - The Establishment of a Copper Mine" and describes B.F. Brown's catering operations on Bougainville Island. It's dear to me because "we", Camp Catering Services, against all the odds had wrenched this multi-million-dollar catering contract from them in April 1972.

I became Camp Catering Services' office manager/accountant - click here - and was one of their few management staff who had local experience as I had worked as senior auditor for the mine's construction managers W.K.E. - Bechtel Corporation since 1970.

And Camp Catering Services were desperately short of people with local knowledge as B.F. Browns very grudgingly gave up this very lucrative contract and had done everything in their power to entice their own staff to leave the island in the hope that we would fail and they could regain their role as caterers which they had held since September 1969. They were so confident we would fail that they kept their management team on the island until May 2nd when they left on a charter flight which became known as the "Champagne Flight".

With Tom Richards, Catering Manager, on far left

Left-to-right: Willie Leong, Wando Taim, Enrico Collavini, Marco Perini, Herman The German

 

Click on image for larger print

Love the 'Motion picture theatre management and operation' which at Camp 6 consisted of rather irregularly and often belately rocking up with a noisy clickety-clickety-clack movie projector, feeding through - sometimes back to front or with the first reel shown last - an often very dated and faded reel, with the sound track drowned out (literally!) by a sudden downpour of rain, and taking an eternity between reel changes or when the celluloid broke, to a roofed-over area on Loloho beach to which you had to bring your own plastic chair

A clean mess hall before the drunken fights started

25 million cans of beer! I know some of the people who drank most of them!

 

We gave it all we got, saw off the challenge, and settled into a successful operation which became the jewel in the crown of Camp Catering Services' contracts in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. I thrive on challenges but the prospect of endless routine after the first five adrenaline-filled months was quite daunting, so when everything was settled down and running smoothly, I handed over my job to a friend and accepted the new challenge of promotion to Group Financial Controller in the company's head office in Sydney.

City life didn't agree with me nor could I see much point in endlessly attending management meetings, endlessly signing cheques, and endlessly drinking cups of coffee brought into my posh office by my very own secretary and so I moved on to 'meatier' jobs in the British Solomon Islands, Burma, Iran, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece. However, I kept in touch with Camp Catering Services' Bougainville manager, Merv Nightingale, whose generous reference opened many more doors for me.

He lost his job when the Sydney head office triumvirate consisting of Joseph Tamas ("the Goulash Chef"), Nelson Hardy, and that little Chinese guy whose hyphenated name escapes me (I think his name was Max Den-Toll), gutless and smelling big money, sold this once-in-a-lifetime contract to S.H.R.M. and wound up the company.

 

 

As they say, all good things must come to an end, even the largest civil catering contract ever undertaken anywhere in the world.