'The Downs'

March 2020
Long-term friends Luke Cooper and Sally Jacobs are unaware of what is heading their way. As commercial pilots, their careers have taken them in different directions. Covid 19, a pandemic, had struck with very little warning! Starting in China it seemed at first that it could not affect Australia to any extent. Incredibly, within weeks, it was spreading quickly across the globe, helped along by the very industry in which he was employed - travel!

Both airlines and cruise lines became the first casualties, as they became the super spreaders of this virulent virus. Overnight, airlines across the globe were shutting down and their aircraft were being parked. Many of these would never fly again. Thousands of people would lose their lives, and millions of people had lost their jobs. Luke Cooper had been one of the first to go. He had been made redundant at age forty. Now, cursing as he struggled with the old sliding hangar doors, he contemplated his lousy luck. He was right back where he started from, almost twenty-one years ago.

As a young man, just turned twenty, fresh out of flying school and brandishing a brand-new Commercial Pilots Licence, Luke Cooper had been offered a position by an old acquaintance of his and, a good friend of his father. The job was as a loader driver and pilot in training for an aerial crop dusting and spraying operation. 'Northwest Aerial Agriculture.' Based at the small regional airport of his hometown, 'Namoi Downs' in the northwest of the state - colloquially known as 'The Downs,' the quiet country town sheltered many secrets of romance and heartbreak as well as mystery and intrigue from both the past and the present. Luke had grown up on his parent's farm, and being the only boy, it was the accepted practice for him to take over the family property of "Craigieburn" when his father, John William (Bill) Cooper, retired. Now, as if that was ever going to happen! He had left 'The Downs' to build a career in the airlines. Sally Jacobs similarly followed her career in aeromedical retrieval and transfers. However, this meant they were living on opposite sides of the country and rarely got to see each other. The friends are brought together again after many years apart. They find that their priorities take a drastic turn, as events steer them in a new direction!

Luke's grandfather, William J. Cooper, first established "Craigieburn", a farm of just over two thousand acres, in the mid-1950s.

1943
William J. Cooper had been a Lancaster pilot based in England during World War Two. Returning to base one night, from a bombing raid over Germany, he and his crew had been hit by anti-aircraft fire over France, the Lancaster Bomber was badly damaged. With some of his crew, either dead or wounded, the landing had not gone well. The heavy bomber had ground looped and he had sustained several broken bones as a result. It had been whilst convalescing in the hospital that he had met his English wife. They had married before returning to Australia, to take up a life on their farm. The couple decided to call the farm 'Craigieburn' after the guesthouse in Scotland where they had spent their honeymoon.

This farm was a legacy that he and his English wife, Elizabeth, were hoping would be passed on for generations to come.