Word: wie
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wie frantically coiled himself up, the spinning tire struck him, laying bare one of his shoulder blades. Bleeding, scorched by flame and chilled by the prop wash, Bas Wie mercifully lost consciousness. For three hours his body stayed so firmly wedged within the struts that it did not fall out even when the big wheel went down again. When the crew found him "just hanging there," Bas Wie seemed close to death...
Scorched & Frozen. A few minutes later, unaware of their small passenger, the crew came aboard and the plane took off. As the ship cleared the runway, Bas Wie's nightmare began. Near him an exhaust pipe spouted orange flame. Freezing propeller blasts whipped his thin shirt, but probably saved him from being overcome by engine fumes. And, to his horrified surprise, the retracting big wheel began to rise to crush him. Fighting back his panic, Bas Wie scrambled into the only possible place of safety-a space ten inches deep and 20 inches high, between a fuel tank...
Year by Year. For three months doctors and nurses in the Darwin hospital tended the boy that everyone came to know as "the Kupang Kid." Then the government, whose "white Australia" policy bars Asian immigrants, brusquely announced that, once restored to health, Bas Wie would be sent back to Timor. Darwin citizens bombarded the Immigration Minister with protests. "A kid with guts like that," said one, "needs encouragement." Yielding to pressure, the government gave Bas Wie a one-year certificate of exemption. Each year after that the certificate was renewed...
...Aussies, Bas Wie soon found, were all that he had remembered them to be. The Northern Territory Administrator himself gave him a home and sent him to school. In return, Bas Wie worked about the official residence, each Christmas presented the Administrator with an intricately carved ship model he had made himself. When the Administrator was transferred, a Darwin couple adopted Bas Wie, and he got a job as a clerk at the Commonwealth Works Department. There, a year and a half ago, 24-year-old Bas Wie met a pretty young white girl from Perth. After a year-long...
This week Bas Wie achieves at last the permanence he has long sought. Making a rare exception in its immigration policy against admitting Asians, the Australian government at last decided to give the Kupang Kid his naturalization papers. "We're proud," said one official, "to have him as an Australian...