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Civil aviation in Australia was in one sense brought into being by the pilots who returned to the country after World War I.[i] In response to the rising use of aircraft in warfare – Turkish positions were bombed with hand grenades from Italian aircraft during the Italo-Turkish war in 1911[ii] – the Commonwealth government established the Australian Flying Corps in 1912 and the Central Flying School in the following year at Point Cook, Victoria. At the 1911 Imperial Conference in London, it had been agreed that aviation needed to be fostered by all national armed forces in the Empire. Australia was the first Commonwealth country to do so. 

Some Australians had a more roundabout path into aviation via the defence forces. Bert Hinkler, for example, had been rejected after applying to join the newly formed aviation section of the Australian Army. He left Australia in 1913 and gained a position in the Sopwith aircraft factory in south-west London. He enlisted in the British Royal Naval Air Services in September 1914.

These aviators were imperial nationalists. While being patriots and Australian nationalists, they were also empire loyalists. Their wartime experience also left them restive and not a little devil-may-care at the cessation of hostilities. During March 1919, the Australian government, at the instigation of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, announced a breathtakingly large prize of £10,000 – the average weekly wage was then just over £9 – for the winner of an air race from England to Australia. Pilots had to be Australian and they needed to complete the journey in no more than 30 days in a British-made plane. Six aircraft and sixteen men entered the competition. The event unfolded like a Bulldog Drummond saga:

four [men] died in crashes, two were arrested as spies in Yugoslavia and two others, after a forced landing in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), had to fend off local tribesmen with hand grenades. Victory went to Ross and Keith Smith (both… [immediately] Knighted) in a British-built twin-engine Vickers Vimy heavy bomber, repaired en route with chewing gum and pieces of fruit crates.[iii]

This real-life adventure struck the popular imagination so much so that a Sydney manufacturer produced a children’s board game, ‘The Sir Ross Smith Aeroplane Race Game’.[iv]

Imperial airspace was one of a few spaces in which aviators could operate: the others were private, commercial and national. And it was a space which accommodated women. Commercial space was far less accommodating: between 1924-27 the International Commission on Air Navigation banned women from holding commercial licenses. Transnational flight gave some women opportunities to explore imperial airspace.[v] Empire aviatrixes thrilled publics across the world with their death-defying feats. British pilot Amy Johnson arrived in Brisbane in 1930; Freda Thompson was the first Australian women to fly solo from England to Australia in 1934; Maude Bonney was the first Australian women to fly solo to England in 1933 and Africa in 1937.This, as a number of writers have noted, was the so-called ‘heroic age’ or ‘golden age’ of Australian and imperial aviation.

There is a leather suitcase in the National Library of Australia.[vi] It relates to an incident in 1935 when pilot Charles Kingsford Smith, co-pilot P.G. (Bill) Taylor and radio operator John Stannage had taken off from Sydney’s Mascot Airport for New Zealand on a promotional freight and mail run. During the flight the centre engine’s exhaust manifold broke off and badly damaged the starboard propeller. Turning back to Sydney, Kingsford Smith closed down the starboard engine, fully powered the other two and jettisoned the cargo. The port engine, however, started leaking oil. Taylor walked out on the starboard wing strut six times to save its oil in a thermos. Each time the full thermos was passed to Stannage in the cockpit who poured it into the suitcase. Taylor then topped up the port engine using the oil in the suitcase. He was awarded the Empire Gallantry Medal for this act of heroism.[vii]

Such stories circulated powerfully in the culture and feed into imperial dimensions of civil aviation. Governments did not just make significant financial contributions to supporting the fledgling industry. They also made heavy emotional, ideological and political investments.[viii] While aviation grew significantly between the war, it spread out, if somewhat slowly, through empires. Britain, like Belgium, France and the Netherlands, strove to build aerial networks within its empire which reached its territorial height in this period. Capturing markets was certainly a consideration. But more importantly, as Marc Dierikx has noted, ‘national prestige’ was paramount.[ix]

Few private interwar airlines were profitable in Britain or Australia and most were heavily subsidised. Contracts to fly mail and freight were the most usual form these took. Thus airlines were first and foremost ‘high-profile national flag-carriers’.[x] Legal considerations also prompted governmental intervention. The Paris Convention of 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conferences had agreed that the international movement of aircraft should not be unrestricted. Countries were given sovereignty above their territories and international waters.[xi]

Aerial connections with territories in the Empire allowed imperialist rivalries to be played out in a new space. Dominance in different air spaces and the level of technological sophistication were measures of the health of empires. And imperialistic competitiveness was ‘the decisive factor in government promotion of the development of long-distance air routes’.[xii]

Merging four struggling British airlines, Imperial Airways Ltd was established by the British government in 1924. It purposes was to forge routes between Britain and its empire. Two year later at the Imperial Conference, a plan was proposed for creating a regular service from Britain to India, Ceylon and Australia. Imperial Airways increasingly withdrew from European services to concentrate on this route. In the process it ran into diplomatic and other clashes with the Koninklijke Nederlandsch-Indische Luchtvaart Maatschappij (KNILM), the airline of the Dutch East Indies, founded in 1928.[xiii] KNILM wished to commence a Batavia to Sydney service in 1929. Writing to the Netherlands Consul-general in Sydney that year, Prime Minister Stanley Bruce pronounced that as far as he was concerned, ‘air services to and from Australia operated by an airline other than Imperial Airways or an Australian company, were simply out of the question’.[xiv] Due to a complex set of international relations and agreements, KNILM did begin a twice-weekly service to Sydney from July 1938. But a Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) aircraft was not to touch down in Australia, on this occasion in Sydney, until 9 December 1951.

The imperial connection was strengthened in other ways. In 1934, to get around a number of legal restrictions, QANTAS and Imperial Airways set up subsidiary named Qantas Empire Airways which was generally referred to as QEA or Qantas. Substantially subsidised, it operated its first London to Brisbane flight in December that year. QEA was legally an Australian company and it had the contract for the Brisbane-Singapore leg (which fell through) and from 1935 that from Darwin-Singapore. This was the beginning of the Kangaroo Route. Imperial Airways, however, was the majority shareholder in the company. But the bonds of Empire were also threatened that year. QEAs first flight had taken 12 days. Three months earlier, the MacRobertson Air Race, held to commemorate Melbourne’s centenary and with a prize pool of £15,000, had been run from Mildenhalk near London to Melbourne. The winner of the handicap division, and the overall runner up with a race time of 81 hours and 10 minutes – under three-and-a half days – was a Dutch airliner flying an American-built Douglas DC-2. It had been entered by KLM.[xv]

This powerfully symbolised a watershed in civil aviation. America had made significant technological advances in stress metal aircraft and aerodynamics. The days of wooden-bodied planes were numbered. Imperial Airways responded quickly by devising a scheme to introduce the ‘Empire Flying Boat Scheme’ – later renamed the ‘Empire Air Mail Service’ – which were much more comfortable and roughly as fast as their competitors. Imperial Airways formally adopted the scheme in January 1936 which meant that ultimately QEA had little choice than to follow suit.[xvi] This, however, did not happen until January 1937. A negotiating team was sent to Britain which initially rejected the plan. Peter Ewer has documented the ‘political surrender’ brought about, among other things, by pressure applied by Britain, lobbying by certain ‘Australian politicians and officials’ and the desire of the Australian government to avoid international embarrassment from ‘declining again the repeated Dutch offers to run the Douglas service on from Java’.[xvii]

During World War II Qantas stuck by the Empire, keeping open the Imperial transport route from Perth via Colombo to Karachi and London. After the bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, Australia began to shift its allegiance from Britain to the USA.[xviii] After the war, in a post-colonial environment, imperial nationalism gave way to Australia nationalism in civil aviation.

Heritage Sources 

Individual Australians such as Lawrence Hargrave were pioneers in the initial development of aviation in a world context. However, the overall development of aviation in Australia was heavily influenced during the first half of the 20^th century by developments in the UK. The interests of the British Empire had long term effects on the selection of key personnel, aircraft types and methods of operation in Australia. The 1919 air race from Britain to Australia celebrated the idea of a direct aerial connection between the two countries[xix]. Over time local needs and the developing local aviation industry became more important and influential. By the end of WW2 Australia had stepped decisively away from the British Empire and from then on was more influenced by world developments, particularly those in the USA.

The role of empire and the shift towards a more Australian national interest is traced in many collections. The QANTAS historical holdings, for example, cover this transition in great detail. Major national collections also contain many items that illuminate Australia’s relationship first to Great Britain and then increasingly to the wider world.

The existing major collections in museums and archives are in the main readily accessible to the public and well-maintained. Access to these information sources through a single digital portal would be highly desirable. There are also major private collections of photographic and documentary material which relate to this theme, including the tens of thousands of images held by the photographer John Hopton[xx], and the extensive aviation archive compiled by Keith Meggs, both of Victoria. Whilst both of these collections have some online presence, notably the Monash University presentation of Meggs’ material[xxi], their long term future and accessibility remain unresolved.