Flying the Southern Cross

by Michael Molkentin

  The unprecedented attention Southern Cross ’ crew received in Sydney is evidence of the significance that ordinary people attributed to the event and the immense pride they felt for what they considered a national achievement. The trans-Pacific flight occurred at a time in which Australians, aware that they had sacrificed much in the Great War, believed they should play a larger part in world affairs. The Pacific flight both validated this view and provided an example of Australians making a highly visible contribution on the world stage.

  In contrast with the shambolic, and indeed dangerous, reception in Brisbane, an ample police presence ensured the tight, efficient management of Southern Cross’ arrival at Mascot.

  On a more pragmatic level, however, people turned out in such immense numbers at Mascot and Eagle Farm because of the innovative manner in which the press had reported the flight. Never before had news coverage been so immediate and engaging. As one anonymous ‘ordinary wage earner’ wrote to The Sun , the live radio coverage had left him ‘shaken to the depths at times’. When Southern Cross landed safely in Brisbane, he ran next door and found his neighbours gathered around their wireless, also in the throes of emotion. Together they went to the pub and ‘with many others drank to the health, happiness and prosperity of those aerial giants’. Warner’s radio transmissions and the excerpts of Ulm’s log published by The Sun had allowed Australians to experience the flight vicariously. Meeting the airmen ‘in person’ represented a logical ending to a journey in which they felt they had all participated.

  The crew of Southern Cross remained in Sydney for three nights, subject to a whirlwind of social engagements. The city hosted them at a civic reception at the Town Hall and paraded them through the centre of Sydney. The Sun and the Lord Mayor each hosted a lunch at the Hotel Australia on Castlereagh Street, while the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) and the Aero Club held separate dinners in their honour. In between, they did wreath-laying ceremonies, radio interviews and attended theatre shows. Warner and Lyon joined in, the Australian public perceiving them not as salaried assistants but partners in a remarkable achievement. Discerning the weight of popular expectation, Ulm announced they would continue with Southern Cross to Melbourne.

  The day they arrived in Sydney, George Allan Hancock cabled from the United States, presenting Southern Cross to Ulm and Kingsford Smith as a gift. Hancock’s considerable generosity effectively cleared their personal debt. This did not, however, stop the public showering them with gifts; nor did it stop organisations such as the RSSILA and various newspapers raising prize money for the airmen. On their third day in Sydney, for example, the party attended a performance at the Prince Edward Theatre where the management presented a £100 cheque and wireless radio sets from the Altwater Kent Company. They received another £5,000 that night at a dinner hosted by the Aero Club. A few days later in Melbourne Vacuum Oil Co. pledged £4,500 and it was rumoured that Lebbeus Hordern, of the wealthy Hordern retailing family, pitched in another £5,000. Still more would come from Canberra’s ex-servicemen later in the week. It is uncertain how much Kingsford Smith and Ulm received in total, though it almost certainly exceeded £30,000—equivalent to about A$2 million today. There were other accolades too; Kingsford Smith and Ulm both received honourary commissions in the Royal Australian Air Force and an Air Force Cross, with an American National Geographic Society Medal and a trophy from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale following. Rumours abounded that they would be knighted.

  Public opinion was practically unanimous: the Pacific fliers deserved the rewards. Some even criticised the federal government for its ‘paltry’ contribution, compared with that from other sources. According to letters to the editor, the public also overwhelmingly believed that Lyon and Warner deserved an equal share. They had undertaken the same risks and, in any case, one of their countrymen’s generosity had made the venture possible in the first place. The issue even came up in parliament, the opposition pressing the Prime Minister to stipulate that Kingsford Smith and Ulm share the government’s award equally with Lyon and Warner. American newspapers raised the question too, although they generally assumed, as The San Francisco Examiner did, that Kingsford Smith and Ulm being ‘the best of good sports will doubtlessly divide the bounty with the crew’. Feeling the squeeze of public opinion again, Ulm attempted to end the speculation with a statement to the press. He somewhat misleadingly claimed that there had been ‘the utmost harmony and comradeship’ between the four men throughout the journey and announced that he and Kingsford Smith had offered the Americans an equal share, but that they had declined to accept it.

  Stay back! Police rush to form a guard around Southern Cross after it touches down at Mascot aerodrome.

  The crew of Southern Cross face the press on the official dais at Mascot, 10 June 1928.

  Jim Warner starting the starboard motor of Southern Cross before take-off to Melbourne from Sydney.

  Warner later denied this, noting somewhat ruefully in his memoir, that ‘to be perfectly truthful I would have liked to have burdened myself down with a dollar or two of this “filthy lucre” ’. He claimed that, in fact, he and Lyon had received numerous offers of gifts but could not accept them because of the contracts they had signed. Warner urged Ulm to release them, but he refused for ten days, ‘by which time it was too late’. The Americans would leave Australia empty handed, though they would share US$12,000 raised by Hearst Newspapers. It represented the equivalent of about half what Ulm and Kingsford Smith had received from the Commonwealth government alone. Ulm’s ruthless approach to upholding the contracts is certainly not endearing, but it cannot be said to have been unethical or illegal. He simply held Lyon and Warner to the unequivocal conditions under which he had employed them. Ulm’s apparent dishonesty to the press, however, is more difficult to excuse.

  Ulm’s wife Jo and Kingsford Smith’s parents Catherine and William greeted the party at Mascot, ending almost a year of separation.

  Southern Cross flew to Melbourne on Wednesday, 13 June, some 50,000 people seeing it off from Mascot aerodrome. Along with the Americans, Kingsford Smith’s mother and Ulm’s wife came along for the ride. Six hours later, they landed at Essendon aerodrome with an escort of 14 Royal Australian Air Force aircraft and before an audience of 100,000 spectators. For almost 8 kilometres, cars gridlocked Flemington Road, creating worse traffic jams than Melbourne typically experienced on Cup Day. An official party including the Premier and the war hero Lieutenant General Sir John Monash greeted the fliers at a well-managed event at the aerodrome before they were whisked off to a dinner at the Menzies Hotel hosted by one of the flight’s sponsors, Vacuum Oil Co.

  The weight of public and press opinion demanded the Americans join Kingsford Smith and Ulm for the publicity tour.

  The crew of Southern Cross and their guests spent the following day in Melbourne being feted at separate functions hosted by the Governor, the Lord Mayor and the RSSILA.

  A body with considerable political influence in Australia during the 1920s, Australia’s ex-service establishment had strongly advocated the flight since its inception, lobbying the government to provide financial support and leading fundraising initiatives throughout the country. In return, Kingsford Smith and Ulm provided the RSSILA with an embodiment of what it called ‘the digger spirit’, which validated the ex-service group’s enduring importance in society and the dominance of ‘Anzac’ and ‘digger’ for Australian national identity. Southern Cross departed for Canberra on Friday morning, 15 June. True to form, the battery generators on the aircraft’s fuselage gave trouble, though this time the culprit was the starboard unit, which ironically had provided reliable service throughout the journey. Flying over Melbourne, Warner had instructions to drop, on Ulm’s signal, a wreath over the Shrine of Remembrance, on which construction had recently commenced. Putting his arm outside the cockpit when the moment arrived, Ulm accidentally hit the spinning generator, bending one of its blades. The generator
began vibrating so severely that as they flew over the city’s outskirts, Ulm passed a message to Warner instructing him to cut the damaged unit free. Leaning out the cabin window with a hacksaw, Warner obeyed, despite having an ‘awful feeling’ that it might hit something—or somebody. Aside from taking some skin of Ulm’s hand, however, the generator caused no injury, but it did break some telegraph wires and bury itself in the platform of Donnybrook railway station. The station-master resisted the temptation to keep the mangled unit as a souvenir and posted it back to Ulm and Kingsford Smith’s office in Sydney.

  In 1928 Canberra was still very much an isolated bush town. Although commissioned as the national capital 15 years previously, the Great War had delayed construction and by mid-1928 the town still had few permanent public buildings and a population of less than 6,000. Parliament House had opened the year before amid sheep-grazing paddocks, though many federal departments remained in Melbourne and would for some time to come.

  The crowd that gathered at Duntroon aerodrome that afternoon was, as a result, much smaller than those in the state capitals, although people had come from as far afield as Goulburn, Cooma and Yass. Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce and his wife met the crew and presented them with £5,000 from the federal government. ‘No man can measure the value of your achievement’, he said. ‘No government can adequately express the feelings of its people in face of your accomplishment.’ That afternoon, the crew attended a reception at Parliament House where the vice-president of the Executive Council, Sir George Pearce, made a lengthy speech in which he quoted from the log, which Ulm had agreed to donate to the Commonwealth. The RSSILA hosted the crew for dinner at the Hotel Canberra (Lyon and Warner became ‘honorary diggers’) and afterwards they attended a picture show at the Capitol Theatre featuring newsreels of their arrival in Brisbane and Sydney. After the week they had experienced it must have seemed like an eternity ago, although it was only six days since Southern Cross ’ wheels had touched down at Eagle Farm and just over a fortnight since they had left Oakland.

  Southern Cross returned to Sydney the next day. The Americans stayed for another week before boarding a steamer bound for San Francisco. Warner left his iconic Panama hat and Lyon his navigational charts as gifts, the latter ending up in the National Library’s collection. In return the Americans accepted a pet kangaroo each, though sadly, neither animal survived long after the sea voyage. Of greater longevity would be the significance of Lyon and Warner’s involvement in the flight for Australian–US relations. To Australians in the 1920s the American people seemed distant and isolated by their own self-interest; their culture had yet to supplant the inherent Britishness that still dominated the Australian outlook. The American contribution to the Pacific flight, and especially Hancock’s generosity, began to erode the cultural barriers between the two nations and restore a mistrust that many Australians felt towards the United States in the aftermath of the Great War. Typical of many who wrote to newspapers on the topic, Mr W. Johnston of Lithgow admitted that American involvement in the flight had changed his opinion ‘concerning America and Americans considerably’ and prompted him to recognise that Australia needed the ‘friendship’ of the United States. Johnston reckoned ‘the flight is in this way far more significant than it first seems’. It was an astute observation. Australia and the United States would become much closer in the coming decades, their mutual interest in the Pacific, as implied by Southern Cross’ flight, being brought into stark relief by the Second World War and the perceived threat of communism thereafter.

  On Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s arrival in Sydney, Vacuum Oil Co. had assigned the two airmen a personal secretary to handle the circus their lives had suddenly come to resemble. It was a big opportunity for Ellen Rogers, being just 21 years old and, like most Australians, having never flown before. She could not have known that her close association with the two Australian aviators—and Ulm in particular— would extend for the remainder of their lives and then, that she would devote much of the rest of her own life to preserving their memory. ‘Rog’, as she quickly became known in the Kingsford Smith–Ulm circle, recalled the post-flight tour as ‘one mad exciting whirl’. In her date book, she counted up 57 official engagements besides ‘a continual influx of visitors’ in between. It had no doubt been a completely gratifying (albeit exhausting) return for the stress and danger that the two Australians had experienced in organising and then carrying out the flight. But fame and fortune did not represent an end in itself. Kingsford Smith and Ulm had in mind big things for Australian aviation. Now, with the Pacific conquered, they believed they had the means to realise their ambitions.

  Lyon and Warner embark for the United States, 23 June 1928. There is no evidence they ever saw Kingsford Smith or Ulm again.

  Crowds at Circular Quay farewell the Americans; their involvement contributed to a shift in Australian attitudes towards the United States.

  ‘THE REST IS EASY’

  The years beyond

  The product of his second marriage, Kingsford Smith had a son, Charles Arthur, in December 1932.

  In the moments following the crew’s sighting of Fiji, Ulm had made a triumphant declaration to Kingsford Smith on the log’s second-last page: ‘The rest is easy Its hard to realize its over and that at the moment we are exceedingly famous’. By ‘the rest’, Ulm meant the final stretch of the Pacific flight connecting Suva with Brisbane. It was typical Ulm: energetic, upbeat and eminently confident. Yet, as we know in hindsight, the worst flying still lay ahead. Southern Cross’ near-catastrophic encounter with an immense tropical storm front between Fiji and the Australian coast demonstrated the flaw in Ulm’s optimistic outlook.

  It would be entirely understandable if after touring Australia’s capital cities, Ulm believed that his newfound fame and fortune assured the achievement of his and Kingsford Smith’s ambitions. Yet any notion of Ulm’s that smooth flying would characterise their subsequent endeavours was likewise to prove ironically and eventually tragically misplaced.

  Amid the whirl of celebrations and endless public engagements in the weeks following the Pacific flight, Ulm later explained that his mind dwelt on one question: ‘What next?’ The public response to the Pacific flight revealed, he believed, Australia’s readiness to adopt air travel as part of the national transport system. While Sydney ‘went mad’ around them and Kingsford Smith enjoyed being the man about town, Ulm got down to business. As Ellen Rogers later recalled of her new employers, ‘Kingsford Smith I found to be a cheery, friendly man who spent a lot of time chatting to his cousins and friends, while Ulm held countless interviews between dictating letters to me’. Among those letters and interviews were the foundation of the inter-city air service Ulm hoped to establish with Kingsford Smith as his partner. It would grow, he hoped, to link Australia to Europe and America via air.

  Having hired a new navigator and wireless operator, in August Kingsford Smith and Ulm made the first non-stop flight from Melbourne to Perth, completing the 3,300-kilometre journey in just under 24 hours. As well as giving the new crew experience, Ulm later admitted he intended to build publicity and demonstrate the feasibility of a trans-city air service. A month later, they flew Southern Cross over the Tasman in the first Australia–New Zealand flight. Although the crossing would only take 14 hours—far shorter than any of the Pacific stretches—the weather proved even more treacherous than that between Suva and Brisbane. Ice caused the radio and gauges to fail and put Southern Cross into an out-of-control dive at one point from which Kingsford Smith and Ulm only narrowly recovered. ‘I think that night I touched the extreme of human fear’, Kingsford Smith later admitted. ‘Panic was very near and I almost lost my head.’

  In Christchurch, Southern Cross received a welcome rivalling the one she had experienced at Mascot following the Pacific flight. For three weeks Kingsford Smith and Ulm toured New Zealand, using the opportunity to drum up publicity and develop business contacts. Kingsford Smith made the most of the boozy celebrations, wh
ile the more earnest Ulm took some flying lessons and finally qualified for his licence.

  Before the end of the year Ulm had arranged necessary finances to establish, with Kingsford Smith, Australian National Airways Limited. To purchase aircraft and hire experienced pilots, they planned to fly Southern Cross to Britain. Their run of incredibly good fortune came to an abrupt end, though, when their inexperienced navigator became lost in a storm over north-western Australia, forcing Southern Cross to land in remote country near the Glenelg River. For the next fortnight the crew survived as castaways before being rescued, the result of a publicly funded search effort.

  In a tragically ironic twist, one of the search party aircraft also went missing: it had been flown by Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s ex-partners Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock. Following the Pacific flight they had unsuccessfully attempted to sue for shares in the venture’s profits. Remarkably, the whole episode had not completely soured the relationship and when Southern Cross went missing, Anderson and Hitchcock agreed to join the search. Their biplane made a forced landing in the Tanami Desert and was not found for three weeks. Anderson and Hitchcock had died from exposure.

  One of ANA’s Avro X airliners above Sydney Harbour, early in 1931. Ulm’s son John recalls watching the bridge’s arches slowly coming together from his father’s Dover Heights house during this time.