Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [76]
Even before the PR department got its new, well-connected chief, it had plenty to deal with. Another long-haul hostie appeared in the papers reported as having a form of mental illness. Naomi Williams, the 35-year-old daughter of surf legend Nat Young, appeared in Manly Local Court in April 2007 accused of theft. She had been spotted by a security officer in Target in Warringah Mall on Sydney’s northern beaches stuffing Stella McCartney designer wear into her handbag. Her solicitor, Arthur Carney, told the court: ‘There are extenuating circumstances. She had just gotten off a long-haul flight from London the night before. Her kids woke her up very early the next morning. She wasn’t thinking. Not only that, the hostess was on medication for post-natal depression and suffered from bipolar disease, which could have triggered the behaviour.’8 She was given a 12-month good behaviour bond for the crime, which was her first offence.
That incident followed the very public unfair dismissal case of Qantas steward Philip Woodward-Brown. After 32 years of loyal service the steward was stopped at Narita airport in Japan and found to have 16 individually wrapped macadamia nut chocolates, three biscuits, one satchet of sugar, one coffee stirrer and two Qantas pens in his pockets. For this grievous calumny he was given the sack – part of the airline’s zero-tolerance-to-theft policy. The Australian Industrial Relations Commission found that Mr Woodward-Brown regarded these items as waste that were to be thrown away at the end of the flight and gave him his job back. The loyal 57-year-old steward had been searched as part of a ‘behavioural performance review’ by the airline, which handled the matter publicly in its customary fashion by refusing to comment.9 The Australian media, meanwhile, had a field day, dubbing the case Chocgate.
In August 1996 the airline faced another scandal because of the behaviour of one of its staff. Steward John Travers Robertson would often knock on the door of female colleagues during overnight stops across the world to discuss problems he was having with his girlfriend. He would make the girls cups of strikingly sweet hot chocolate. It was laced with a stupefying drug – probably the date-rape drug Rohypnol. When the groggy stewardesses passed out, he would strip them and take photographs. The Qantas steward was finally caught after giving his knockout chocolate to a stewardess at the Hilton Hotel in Cairns on 6 April 1994. They had been out to dinner with the rest of the cabin crew on the stopover when he knocked on her door for a chat and a hot chocolate. She noticed it took an unusually long time to make the drink and seemed sweeter than normal when she drank it. The stewardess, who was fully clothed at the time, started to feel groggy and then blacked out. She woke up after an abnormally long sleep of more than 12 hours wearing only her panties and feeling quite sick. She reported the incident. A police raid on Robertson’s Gold Coast home found photographic negatives of two naked and clearly unconscious Qantas hosties, one of whom had been placed in a ‘demeaning and indecent’ position on the bed.10 When called in, the shocked women had absolutely no recollection of the photographs being taken.
In fact Qantas staff had been troubled by rumours about female flight attendants being drugged and taken advantage of at stopovers across the globe. In total, 14 would report suffering similar symptoms of grogginess having shared a hot chocolate with John Robertson. Four would come forward to tell of incidents in Los Angeles, Pretoria and Harare in 1992 and in London in 1994. At Robertson’s trial in South-port District Court in Queensland in 1996, the stewardess who was attacked in London described how the last thing she remembered was him touching her breasts before she slipped into unconsciousness.