Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Exactly! Once ‘airmail’ took hold in Australia, Ulm was convinced, with a letter being delivered from Perth to Sydney in just a little over a day—instead of the ten days it took currently by ship—the public would refuse to send it any other way, and would be happy to pay the extra cost. The key was to get the tender from the government to carry that post, and Ulm set about proving to the Federal government that he was just the man, with just the airline to do it.

  From the beginning, he was up against it. Only a couple of years earlier, Postmaster-General William Webster had been quoted extensively deriding the whole concept: ‘The whole question of aerial mails is absolutely impracticable as far as this country is concerned. They may be of some value in densely-populated countries, where short journeys are entailed, but here in Australia, with our sparse population and long distances between big mailing centres, the whole position is as different as night is from day. You just said now that Australia will be the last country to encourage aerial mail services. Let me tell you that, unless I’m very much mistaken, Australia will be the last county in the world to require them.’19

  Unperturbed by such negativity, and there was plenty of it around, Charles Ulm pushed on. He sent his proposals to the Federal government, who acknowledged receipt, and filed them away in the ‘circular filing cabinet’. Forever…

  Broke again. Always bloody broke. This could not go on. On 2 June 1924, in the middle of a letter to his parents, Kingsford Smith noted, ‘I feel bad at not having sent any more over recently, but I have been slugged with £73.18.6 income tax, and have been at my wits end to find it…’ Before that letter had reached home, however, a cable arrived on 6 June 1923 that came as quite a shock.

  Married five minutes ago. Thelma and self send fond love—Chilla.20

  He’d done what? Married a girl they hadn’t even met, and without inviting anyone from the family to be there? What had he been thinking?

  A follow-up letter from their son a few days later, however, explained how it had all happened.

  He had gone out to Meentheena to bring Thel in for the Marble Bar Ball—a really big do in those parts, held annually—and one thing had led to another. They were having a bit of a drink in the pub, talking about their plans for the future when the thought hit them—why wait? Why not marry right away, as in, today? They were, after all, in the prime of their lives, and every month they weren’t married was a month of each other they were missing. If they were married they wouldn’t have to keep making these infernal trips to and from Meentheena, and could be together. True, Smithy’s capacity to be a provider for them in the long term was a little unsure, but Thel proved to be a brick on this subject.

  ‘When,’ Smithy wrote to his parents, ‘I told Thel that it might prove unfair to her to take on a partner whose future might prove somewhat uncertain, she said that if she didn’t face the downs of life as cheerily as the ups with me we shouldn’t get married at all.’21

  So that was good enough for Smithy! By lunchtime they had made up their minds that they would do it, and by 3 pm they were married in the Marble Bar Registrar’s Office by special licence with the Marble Bar postmaster presiding.22 True to form, Smithy had no wedding ring handy, and had to borrow one from a local friend, a Mrs Airey, who only just managed to get it off her own finger for the occasion.23

  That afternoon and into the evening, the happy couple gloried in one of the biggest, most spontaneous celebrations in the Ironclad Hotel that ‘The Bar’ had seen in many a long year, as the word spread all over the Pilbara. It’s Smithy! He’s gorn and married the Corboy girl, Thelma! You know, from Meentheena! Come quick! Local kids would long remember how in the middle of all the festivities, Smithy remembered them and came outside to give them the most unheard of things they’d ever heard of—a case of apples and a case oranges!24

  For their honeymoon, Smithy took his new bride back to Port Hedland on an open railway hand trolley, pumping up and down all of the 124 miles!25 On arrival, he installed her at the place where he and all the airline’s crowd stayed when stopping in that town, Mrs Mousher’s boarding house, before he had to resume his flying schedule just a couple of days later. No doubt it came as something of a shock to the system for Thelma…ah…Kingsford Smith, to find herself no longer with the run of Meentheena but instead put up in the bare room of a boarding house. And it must also have been hard waiting for her, um, husband to return to Port Hedland, which he did for two days a week. But she coped. Just.

  There was a brief interlude when Smithy took her ‘back east’ to meet his family, but from the beginning it did not quite go as planned, even though the clan turned out in force to meet them at Sydney’s Central Station. The Kingsford Smiths wanted to love Thelma from the beginning, and she, no doubt, wanted to love them.

  But she was nothing less than a lady, in the slightly elite sense of the word, and they were a boisterous, loud, loving family who were not overly particular about the finer points of etiquette. Making things even more difficult was the fact that only shortly after the newly married couple was installed at Kuranda, Chilla was dashing around like a mad thing, trying to meet up with a fellow by the name of Lebbeus Hordern. This man, himself a veteran of the Royal Flying Corps was a member of the famous retailing family and Charles wanted to see if he could buy one of Hordern’s seaplanes to get that infernal Pacific flight going—he was always talking about it!—leaving Thel alone with a group of people she didn’t know, even if they were now nominally ‘family’.26 A kiss, a ‘bye-bye’ and a ‘see-you-soon!’ Then, when Charles finally returned late in the day, he would only be there for a short time before he would be off to bars all over Sydney catching up with old mates.

  Well, hell, Thel.

  Most days and many evenings, Thelma found herself high and dry at Kuranda in Longueville, left with Charles’s elderly parents, who were old enough to be her grandparents. It was only a very short time before they ran out of things to talk about. After just two weeks, Thelma had had enough, and insisted to Charles that they return to their life in the west. And yet he wouldn’t hear of it. Thelma was beside herself. It seemed to her that Charles was so absorbed by his own needs that things might be just as bad when they got back west.27

  As it turned out, they sort of were, and nothing was easier once they had settled back into Mrs Mousher’s boarding house again. Sometimes Thelma’s mother would come to visit her, and she at least knew quite a few locals at Port Hedland, and generally the Airways people who came through. Mostly, however, Thelma was spending a lot of time waiting for her prince of the air to return to her small part of the earth.

  Things got a little better for the newlyweds when in the last months of 1923 they moved up to Carnarvon, by the mouth of the Gascoyne River, and rented a better furnished house than they could quite afford, but Smithy’s long absences remained a problem. At this point, he was not only flying 1000 miles a week, but also filling the role of managing director of Western Australian Airways whenever Major Brearley was absent, which was frequently. And then, when her husband did return to Carnarvon, it turned out that what he most liked to do, after spending the briefest of times with her—fifteen minutes should do it—was catch up with friends at the pub, sing riotous songs till all hours, and laugh and drink the night away. Had she made a mistake?

  Had he made a mistake? At the time, in late 1923, Smithy had seized on the suggestion of Thelma’s stepfather, Maurice McKenna, that he take over a pastoral lease of 63,000 acres, right next to Meentheena. It would get Thel closer to her mother and the life she had known, it would provide him with a more settled life to be with her and, most importantly of all, it would give him a chance of making the really big money he needed to reach his goal of the Pacific flight. And he really did like the idea of being the lord or laird, or whatever that word was, of such a vast spread of land. His broad vision was to open some of the land up to returned servicemen and between them they could establish a kind of pastoral syndicate.28 But in the end, after he had com
mitted to it and signed the papers, he decided that the time was not yet right to go through with it, and so he persuaded his sister Elsie and her husband Bert Pike to come over, with his cousin, Phil Kingsford, to run the property for him.

  On the trip north from Perth to get there, Elsie could not quite believe how many people knew her little brother. Kingsford Smith, did you say? Kingsford Smith? You’re Smithy’s sister?! Smithy is a great mate of mine! Jacko, this is Smithy’s sister, can you believe it? Come to help him on that property he bought! Good ol’ Smithy.

  We drink together often at the Gascoyne Hotel.

  He helped me out once.

  He was seeing my sister for a little while, but we haven’t seen him since.

  I was on a steamer once when he flew so low over it he nearly blew the bloody boilers off!

  I was there the day he dinkum touched the corrugated-iron roof of the Port Hotel in Port Hedland with the wheels of his mail plane!29

  Good ol’ Smithy.

  Wherever she went, Elsie seemed to be having conversations of that order with just about every second person she met, and it was apparent that whatever else, her little brother was a hugely popular man in these parts.

  Though generally a happy soul, George Wilkins was as profoundly depressed as ever he had been in his life. At the behest of the British Museum, he had accepted a commission to go on a 2500-mile journey, over two and a half years through the Top End of Australia to collect specimens of fauna and flora to place in the venerable museum’s collection—with a particular focus on native mammals. With three companions, and occasional Aboriginal guides in various regions, Wilkins was engaged in doing exactly that, and yet the more he trekked the more he realised just how devastating the effect of European colonisation had been on his homeland. As he travelled he documented the massacres of Aborigines, the wholesale slaughter of wildlife to the point of extinction, the infestation of pests such as rabbits and foxes, and the catastrophic clearing of the natural environment for the purposes of providing grazing lands making the likelihood that dozens of more native mammals would be wiped out a near certainty.

  ‘There is no doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that we are witnessing the passing of these mammals, and that as far as indigenous life is concerned, Australia is in the death-throes.’30 Typically, he kept on going, through some of the most forbidding country in Australia, sometimes pondering just how long a man would be able to survive without supplies or native expertise.

  In the first two years of its existence, Western Australian Airways had done well, in part because of Norman Brearley’s astute management and in part because of the dedication of his pilots—none more so than Kingsford Smith, whose log showed he had flown nigh on 100,000 miles of the firm’s total of 300,000 miles to date.31 Not unreasonably, the pilots took the view that their dedication should be rewarded with a pay rise. It was equally evident that Smithy, both their natural leader and official leader as chief pilot, should be the one to represent them in what they were pleased to think of as ‘negotiations’.

  ‘Cept the negotiations didn’t really get very far—only as long as it took for Smithy to formally threaten on behalf of the pilots that if their demands were not met then ‘like Arabs, we will fold our tents and silently steal away’,32 and Brearley to say no to each and every one of those demands. Smithy tried charm, he tried reason, he tried anger, threats of them all walking away and an appeal to Brearley’s sense of generosity.

  No. No. No. No. No. NO.

  In the end, such was the stand-off there were only two possibilities. Either Smithy and his fellow pilots would have to back down, or some of them would have to follow through on their threats and leave the company.

  Smithy chose the latter. He liked Brearley and he felt he owed him because of the chance Brearley had given him two years earlier when he had been very much down on his luck. But on the other hand, it was also his reckoning that after his faithful service of the last two years, and the money that Western Australian Airways had made, that debt had been paid, and the pilots’ demands were not unreasonable. Therefore, in the face of Brearley’s refusal to buckle, he would take his hat, his coat and his umbrage and walk out the door, and in this exit was followed by all the other pilots bar two.

  Brearley was sorry to see Smithy, particularly, go. ‘He was a really first class pilot of the type needed for overcoming the hazards that faced us in the 1921 and ‘22 period,’ he later reminisced. ‘Of course, he had to be “tamed” for our course and he submitted when he realised this. His improvement in general behaviour was a gradual process and this development came slowly but surely.’33

  At the time, however, Smithy had few warm thoughts for Brearley, and was upset about how the negotiations had failed. Not that there weren’t some upsides…

  ‘Thelma is very philosophical about it all,’ Chilla wrote to his parents on 15 February 1924, perhaps gilding the lily a little about his wife’s true feelings. ‘She is a great little kid, God bless her and stands behind me in everything.’34

  Keith Anderson, of course, went with Smithy. Inseparable by now, the two had a plan, beyond the flying of the Pacific, which they talked about interminably, a plan they hoped might deliver them the money they needed to fulfil that dream. Over the past couple of years of flying around the north-west of Australia, they had seen first-hand both how rich some of the station owners were, and at the same time how poor were the facilities they used to move their product to market. It was all very well for the planes to take the station owners to Perth and back in a couple of days, but what about their clips of wool? How did they get to market? And how did the supplies they needed on their stations get to them?

  The answer was by such primitive means as camel trains, and as a matter of fact Carnarvon had been built with a main street wide enough for a camel train to turn around. So it was that Kingsford Smith and Anderson decided to buy into an existing garage owned by a Carnarvon local, Tom Carlin, and expand the whole thing. They had formed the view that what was most needed in the north-west of Australia at that time was trucks. Big trucks, and lots of them. The idea was that Kingsford Smith and Anderson would personally buy and operate them, and use the contacts they had developed with station owners over the past two years to build the business from there—a business that they co-owned, not merely took a salary from.

  If they got it right, they might even be able to make enough money from the business to fly the Pacific! For the funds to get started, they took out a loan with Keith Anderson’s mother, Constance, which allowed for their first truck to be bought. Smithy’s part of that loan was £150, interest free, for six months, for which he was immensely grateful.35 Typically, he also borrowed money from his family back east, including his sister Winifred and his brother Eric. (In some ways his financial relationship with his family was a twist on the Marxian model: from each according to their means, to Chilla according to his needs.)

  And so the Gascoyne Transport Company was born…

  The headquarters was established at Carnarvon, and the initial truck was an enormous American-built 3-ton Republic bought on hire-purchase. This was used to bring the wool from every station within cooee—and sometimes as far away as two or three cooees—and deliver it to the Carnarvon wharves. Certainly, it went against the grain to give up flying, but both men felt it was a means to an end.

  And the preliminary signs were good. After just one month’s operation, Chilla was very proud to report to his even prouder parents that so far the business was ‘a great success’, and that their gross takings were ‘around £380’.36 Now, just how much of that was profit, he wasn’t quite sure, as figures had never been his forte and he generally found the actual running of a business really dull work, as opposed to the actual fun of doing stuff, but the venture certainly seemed promising. It wasn’t long before he and Anderson were able to afford to buy Carlin out and run the show on their own.

  And yet, while his trucking business had been growing, his parents-in-law on Meentheena ha
d gone bust with so many debts after the devastating drought they had just been through, that the bank had foreclosed on them. Thelma was deeply upset to see her stepfather reduced to going gold prospecting again, while for his part Smithy was a little stunned to find himself the chief provider for a family he had never heard of two years previously. And, clearly, in such tough times, and without his father-in-law to supervise things, his own hopes of establishing a successful pastoral syndicate were also over—his only hope of salvation lay with his trucking business. (His father-in-law clearly tried other things to stay afloat, as within six months he was convicted in Perth Supreme Court for rustling and received two years’ hard labour in Fremantle Gaol, together with twelve strokes of the cat-o’-nine-tails.)37

  Penned in 1906, they were among the most famous lines by an Australian, about Australia:

  I love a sunburnt country,

  A land of sweeping plains,

  Of ragged mountain ranges,

  Of drought and flooding rains,

  I love her far horizons,

  I love her jewel sea,

  Her beauty and her terror—

  The wide brown land for me.

  Which was fine. The truth of it, however, was that Dorothea Mackellar would have been unlikely to have written those immortal lines had she been a long-distance truck driver trying to move along those plains, over those mountains, through those floods and towards those endlessly receding far horizons, ever and always on a track winding back to nowhere in particular.