September 11, 2001 might be branded as the darkest day in our collective memory, but for Ray Cervai, it was the events of three days later that stood out for him personally.

That was the day Ansett Australia grounded all flights, leaving the Melbourne businessman, who officially supplied the airline with merchandise, with more than half a million dollars of Ansett-themed products stored in his shed.

“It felt like someone had shot me in the stomach,” says the semi-retired Cervai.

Almost 20 years on, another airline – Virgin Australia – entered voluntary administration. The collapse, like Ansett’s, was precipitated by a massive global disruption, this time coronavirus.

As the government fended off appeals for a bailout, the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, pointed to Virgin Australia’s 90% foreign ownership to declare: “This is not Ansett. This is not the end of the airline.”

As potential buyers mount bids to save Virgin Australia from collapse, the legacy of Ansett has evolved from an aviation powerhouse into a small but thriving community.

While the airline may have stopped flying, the Ansett name and logo live on as a basketball club, a museum in regional Victoria, and a now-booming online retail business for Cervai.

“We already had the news of 9/11 come in one morning that week, and then two days later, at four o’clock in the morning, I woke up and heard someone in my house crying,” Cervai says, referring to the news of Ansett’s collapse after administrators determined it could not be rescued.

A former employee of Ansett’s display department, Cervai, who thought the company could do a better job with its merchandise, had negotiated with the company to “branch out” and start his own business in 1988 to supply the airline with promotional material.

He says the week of Ansett’s collapse was one of the worst weeks of his life. “I was always more worried my Ansett business would go down rather than the airline itself.”

Unsure of what to do with the hoard of Ansett clothing, gifts, toys and other items he had, with no orders to fill, Cervai received a call a day after Ansett’s collapse from someone offering to buy him out for 20 cents per T-shirt and 30 cents per jumper.

“I said, are you serious mate? Pardon my French but you can go and get fucked,” he says.

Instead, the semi-retired Cervai decided to start up a website to sell the items. While its sales were quiet in its early years, he says Ansett merchandise is now more popular than ever.

“Now it’s selling like hotcakes, it’s hard to believe,” says the 73-year-old, who reports a recent sales spike over the past two years has peaked during the coronavirus lockdowns.

He also attributes a part of the surge in sales to the indie pop band Client Liaison, which he supplied with Ansett props for a 2017 music video. He says he can now notice a spike in sales on his website after the band has a concert. After Virgin Australia entered administration in April, Client Liaison started a petition to rebrand the airline Ansett Australia.

Cervai now stores the remaining “tens of thousands” of Ansett products in a large shed at his home in Mickleham, in Melbourne’s north. He says many former Ansett employees “come by to have a cry and get their Ansett fix”.

He also supplies clothing for the annual Ansett employee reunion in Brisbane each July, as well as a cruise that former flight attendants take in Sydney each year.

His first job was working as a mail deliverer for Ansett as a teenager in 1966, and remembers being tasked with racing “hot off the press” newspapers from Melbourne city to Sir Reginald Ansett – the airline’s founder – as he sat in a Cadillac on the airport’s tarmac.

Cervai met his wife at Ansett – she worked as a secretary in the finance department. The couple’s children now refer to him as the “Ansett man” for giving them airline-themed gifts each year and wearing Ansett clothing around.

“I can’t let it go, I’ll see my time out selling all this stuff, not for the money. It’s about, what does that guy in The Castle say, it’s the vibe of the thing. To keep Ansett alive,” he says.

While Cervai offers arguably the largest range of Ansett clothing, he doesn’t supply the jerseys worn by Darwin’s Ansett Basketball club, which fielded more than 220 registered players in the most recent season.

Paul Rowse, the club’s vice president, says the under-10s “wouldn’t have a clue it was an airline”.

When older visitors to Darwin see the club’s logo “they always have a laugh”, he says, “but the younger people don’t know anything about it”.

The Ansett Basketball club was formed in 1975 by the airline’s workers, who would be based in Darwin for two and three-year rotations. After Cyclone Tracy devastated the city, the club served primarily as a social outlet for employees new to the town which had lost much of its infrastructure and gathering spaces.

Paul Hunt, a former Ansett Basketball president, coach and player whose son plays for the team, says “It was certainly put together by a group of guys who liked to have a drink.”

Hunt says while Darwin’s population in the 1980s remained “fairly transient” due to rotations of corporate and administrative workers, the Ansett club was seen as a community for those new to the city.

The club even fielded Glenn Marsland, a basketballer who represented Australia in the sport at the 1972 Munich Olympics, who had moved to Darwin after the peak of his career to work as an air traffic controller at Darwin airport. Ian Davies, who was part of Australia’s basketball team at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, also played for Ansett later in his career.

When Ansett collapsed in 2001, the club had about 160 players, and stopped receiving Ansett sponsorship. The airline had sponsored the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the cricket, but its sponsorship of the basketball team had constituted a handful of domestic return airfare vouchers each year the club would raffle off to raise funds.

“We thought at the time that the airline would be rescued, probably like everybody else now thinks with Virgin. It came as a fairly big shock when we realised it wouldn’t exist,” Hunt says.

In 2018, the basketball club was featured on ABC’s show Gruen, about carrying a sponsor’s name that no longer exists. At the sight of an Ansett player pictured mid-slam dunk, host Wil Anderson joked, “they managed to stay in the air longer than a commercial airline”.

The Ansett basketball team in Darwin - Best team ever!! #Gruen @Wil_Anderson pic.twitter.com/EVbGamZz6P

— abctv (@ABCTV) May 31, 2018

The club now boasts more than 220 players and won the NT’s highest state competition in 2016 before a crowd of 750. “Ansett is synonymous with basketball now, we’re one of the strongest clubs in the city,” Hunt says.

Ansett is also an important part of the identity of Hamilton in western Victoria, where a museum is dedicated to the airline, and Sir Reginald Ansett’s road transport businesses, that started in the town.

Ansett’s family attended the museum’s opening in 1991, which was built after locals took the idea to the council.

The museum is housed in the original airline hangar that housed the Fokker Universal plane that flew Ansett’s inaugural route between Hamilton and Melbourne in 1936. It is now run by volunteers seven days a week, and hosts about 300 visitors a month, which are mostly former Ansett employees, coach passengers who stop off in Hamilton and local school groups.

Displays include a restored Fokker aircraft, models, vehicles, flight attendant and baggage handler uniforms, inflight kitchen dining sets used in service, and other memorabilia.

“A lot of people don’t even realise there is an Ansett museum, but it’s actually gotten busier for us after the collapse,” says Heather Kruger, secretary of the museum.

Kruger sympathises with the uncertainty Virgin employees are facing – almost two decades after Ansett grounded its flights, she is still hopeful it will return to the skies.

“Sir Reg put Hamilton on the map. We’re still hurting, we’d love for Ansett to come back.”