Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Qantas had taken a step up again.

  Four days after that first launch, however, on the morning of 21 April, Lester Brain, with a two-man crew, was flying the Atalanta—which had been chartered by the Sydney Citizens Rescue Committee to join the search for the Kookaburra, as well as sponsored by the Guardian—over a particularly barren part of the Tanami Desert about halfway between Alice Springs and Wyndham. Brain was a new breed of pilot—the first man hired by Qantas to fly their planes not to have flown in the war—and he was a careful, considered type of man far removed from the hard-drinking larrikin type.46 Before taking off, he had been sure there was plenty of water and supplies on board, should the worst come to the worst. For over a week he had reckoned that the Kookaburra would be located in this part of the country and he was keeping an eagle-eye out for any sign that his theory might be correct.

  And now, from a distance of about 60 miles, he really did spot something odd. It was a smudge of smoke rising slowly from the south-west. He knew this was a region of Australia where there were no habitations and no blacks as there was no available water, so the smoke was definitely worth investigating. In the cabin, advised of the smoke they were going to investigate, the Atalanta‘s mechanic, P.H. Compston, was immediately reminded of a conversation he’d had that morning with an old Aboriginal man at Wave Hill station, where they were flying from.

  ‘You been hunting dead fella,’ the old man said. ‘Where you fly?’

  Compston pointed south, to which the elder replied, ‘I see big smoke out that way, but dunno.’47

  Altering course, it was not long before they saw burnt and still smouldering bushes and something else, Lester Brain thought—something that obviously didn’t belong in the desert.

  Could it be…?

  It was!

  A plane! Surely, it was the Kookaburra. Exultant, Brain nosed his plane down, hoping to see a couple of ragged men—both of whom were close friends of his48—excitedly waving their arms in the air, when he saw it. Under the starboard wing of the plane, at least in the rough shade, lay a body, belly-down.

  Perhaps sleeping?

  Alas…no. As the pilot flew back and forth at a height of just 15 feet above the stricken aircraft, there was not the tiniest sign of movement from whoever it was—though Brain was almost certain it was Anderson. What he was in no doubt about now was that the person was dead. His face was burnt black, his head resting on his right arm, while his left arm appeared to be beneath his body. But where was the other man? From the air he could see the crisscrossing tracks back and forth where the plane had clearly tried, but failed, to take off. It was as obvious what had happened, as it was apparent that to land his own plane on that wasteland would be suicide—the Atalanta would be unlikely to ever get off the ground again.

  The most important thing was to get a land party in there and, after dropping by parachute water and food on the off chance that the missing man was still alive, Brain quickly headed towards Wave Hill station, 80 miles to the north.

  It was Arthur Hilliard who quietly told his daughter Bon the news at their Cremorne home that evening. It was hard, darling, he knew, but they must face reality. Bon wept—of all the hard things, one of the hardest was the thought that Keith might have died without getting her telegram telling him that she still loved him and did want to marry him—but then rallied.

  ‘We must tell Keith’s mother how we feel,’ she said. And in short order they sent a telegram to that devastated lonely woman in Perth, now confined to her room under medical care. It read:

  Do not grieve. We must be brave. Keith is magnificent.49

  Charles Kingsford Smith and the rest of the Southern Cross crew were at the Wyndham airstrip, about to take off to join the search, when they were quietly told the news. The Kookaburra had been found in the Tanami Desert. One body located. One still missing, though, after ten days in the desert, almost certainly dead. The plane was at a point 22 degrees to the right of where Anderson had intended to go, and they had gone down 115 miles to the north-east of where anyone might have expected to find them. In the exact middle of nowhere…

  It was one of the low points of Smithy’s life. For Keith and Bobby to have died was bad enough. To have died while searching for them, however, was excruciating. And there would be a lot more pain to come.

  For its part, the Guardian was now in full cry against both Kingsford Smith and Ulm, and their key newspaper competitors. ‘Only one advantage has appeared from the tragic incidents of the Smith-Ulm venture,’ it thundered, ‘namely an increase in certain newspaper circulations. The Sydney Sun, the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Melbourne Herald, have financially interested themselves in ‘exclusive world rights’, to anything written or spoken by the crew of the Southern Cross…and gleefully proclaim they have sold more papers.’50

  What was to be done?

  The Guardian had no doubt. It was nothing less than the ‘imperative duty’ of Prime Minister Bruce to immediately launch a public inquiry to get to the bottom of how the whole disaster occurred, and how it could be prevented from occurring again.

  So great had the public outcry become, and the accusations that were flying back and forth, that the following day Stanley Bruce did indeed announce that an official Air Inquiry Committee would be formed to investigate the affair. The committee’s terms of reference included, crucially, ‘to investigate all aspects of the flight from its start to the landing at Coffee Royal’, and to ‘search out thoroughly all facts concerning the deaths of Anderson and Hitchcock’. (On the subject of those dead airmen, Prime Minister Bruce announced a short time afterwards that a fresh expedition would be sent into the nation’s interior to retrieve their bodies.)

  The members of the board of the inquiry were also subsequently announced as Brigadier General Lachlan C. Wilson, Captain Geoffrey Hughes and Cecil Newton McKay. Wilson was a no-nonsense lawyer, just as he had been a no-nonsense army man who had fought at Gallipoli and in Palestine, before commanding the 3rd Light Horse Brigade in serious battles in Jordan. Hughes was a distinguished and decorated war veteran, having flown with the Royal Flying Corps and been twice mentioned in dispatches before co-founding the New South Wales Aero Club. Although Hughes enjoyed great respect from his peers, his impartiality in this affair may not have been total, as he had been one of the earliest and most strident critics of the trans-Pacific venture, saying that it was ‘impossible’ to fly from Honolulu to Australia. Cecil McKay ran a successful engineering business and was also chairman of the Victorian branch of the Royal Aero Club, with a long background in flying.

  Both Kingsford Smith and Ulm expressed satisfaction at the announcement of the inquiry. ‘We wholeheartedly welcome the fullest possible inquiry,’ Ulm was shortly thereafter quoted. ‘We have nothing to hide. On behalf of all of us in the Southern Cross, I would like to say how terribly distressed we feel about the fate of poor Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock. I became a close personal friend of Andy in America, and it is not possible for me to find words to tell how awfully upset I am about it.’51

  While the land party from Wave Hill—under the command of Flight Lieutenant Charles Eaton of the RAAF—was still struggling to get to the Kookaburra in a group that included three white men in a 1927 Buick tourer and three Aboriginal stockmen with twenty-six horses, the Southern Cross departed Wyndham and headed back to Sydney, abandoning the London trip for the moment. At Smithy’s insistence they took a detour across the desert and found the Kookaburra, exactly as Brain had described it. The fire was still burning across a 5-mile front, and there lay the plane that had been heading towards their salvation, but now marked the spot where two good men had died. They could see one of them, clad only in singlet and underpants, still lying under one wing, face down. On the Southern Cross, no-one spoke. They, too, dropped some food and water in the vain hope that someone was alive, but—after taking aerial photographs—flew on to Newcastle Waters all but certain that it was hopeless.

  On 25 April the Guardian published
a startling headline across the top of its front page:

  INFAMOUS ATTACK BY ‘SUN’ ON ANDERSON52

  It was in response to an editorial in the Sun the day before, where its editors had appeared to exculpate Kingsford Smith and Ulm and blame Anderson and Hitchcock, by noting that the latter had gone out there ‘of their own free will’ in an attempt that was ‘suddenly conceived and hastily equipped…less carefully organised than the flight of the Southern Cross’.53

  ‘Everybody knows,’ the Guardian responded, ‘that the Sun and Telegraph were financially interested in Smith and Ulm’s flight. The Sun’s shameless attempt to promote condemnation against Anderson (who is dead) and to arouse approbation for Smith and Ulm (who are living) was a vile debasement of a newspaper’s opportunities. The mean and caddish endeavour to escape the due inquiry was beneath all public decency.’54

  In fact, however, none of the papers, or the aircrews they were sponsoring, could have been said to be above commercial considerations in the face of Anderson and Hitchcock’s tragic deaths. At Newcastle Waters, Lester Brain and his crew had come face to face with Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Litchfield and McWilliams. It wasn’t long before both parties realised that they were in possession of photos of the Kookaburra and the prone body beneath the wing, which their respective papers were screaming for. A veritable race would ensue to see who could get their photos to their papers first, with the two planes setting off early the following morning.55

  In Longreach, meanwhile, Hudson Fysh was still exulting over the success of Lester Brain in the Atalanta, when he reported to the Qantas board: ‘Owing to the nature of the trip the publicity which we received amounted to a tremendous boost for Mr Brain and for Qantas. The helpful publicity which we have received through the success of the two search trips could probably not have been bought for any money.’56

  On the morning of Saturday, 27 April 1929, the journal Smith’s Weekly covered its entire front page with an attack on Kingsford Smith and Ulm, while simultaneously lionising Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock:

  THE SACRIFICE!

  Why Was It Necessary For Anderson to Have Crashed as He Did?

  SOUTHERN CROSS FIASCO.

  Dead…dead…dead…that lonely body under the plane wing with the smouldering bush around him as a majestic funeral pyre…57

  The most scathing article was penned by Sir Joynton Smith, the proprietor of the newspaper, and it charged Sun Newspapers with obscuring the Anderson affair in order to glorify the Southern Cross crew.

  ‘For the sake of that sun-blackened body in the northern wilderness,’ the knight of the realm thundered, ‘all Australia will make enquiry, and will demand answers…Australia’s eyes are dim with sorrow; but Australia’s eyes are heavy with a dim regret. We must find out why this chapter of accidents came to be written, with so dread an ending. It is S.M. Bruce’s business to discover the answers to which all Australia is asking.’58

  Into just such a storm did the Southern Cross land, when on that very morning—the day after the Guardian had published its exclusive photos of the stricken Kookaburra—it arrived at Richmond before a tiny crowd of just a few hundred people, including a large pack of pressmen. So gravely had the public mood changed since the four men had left a month earlier, that some in the crowd even hissed and booed at the airmen after they emerged, yelling out such things as ‘Liar!’ ‘Cheat!’ ‘Hoaxer!’59—something that, again, stunned them.

  Ordinarily, whenever on a tarmac of any description, going to or coming from anywhere, Smithy was a cyclone of charismatic energy, waving to all and sundry, kissing pretty women, shaking hands with anyone who proffered theirs and dropping one-liners. Not on this occasion, however. He was devastated by the accusations and outraged by them.

  ‘I have nothing to say,’ he told the reporters. ‘As all the papers seem to misinterpret what we say, I will say nothing in future.’60 That notwithstanding, he and Ulm did then give an exclusive interview to a reporter from the Sun, where they were able to get their own side of the story across.

  Not that this quelled the public attack in any way. The most outrageously slanderous one came from a publication called Plain Talk, which stated outright, ‘It has been asserted that Smith and Ulm should lose themselves where they did and that Keith Anderson should find them; the idea being that Keith Anderson should be given public reward.’61

  And people believed this nonsense! They actually thought that while on a journey to buy planes to set up an airline, he and Ulm had thought it might be a good idea to crash-land their uninsured plane on a West Australian swamp, on the reckoning that, if they survived, the resultant publicity might be advantageous to them.

  At Kuranda, Smithy started to receive hate mail, as did his brothers and sisters at their own homes. Hissing editorials continued to spit at him, and some people shouted insults at him in the street.

  In response, Kingsford Smith was devastated. Already shattered by the tragic deaths of Anderson and Hitchcock, he was now confronted full on by the fickle nature of the Australian public. Less than a year before, he had been cheered to the echo wherever he went, hailed as a hero—the man who’d flown across the Pacific Ocean! And now he was a pariah, a coward, a cur, practically a murderer! Within days the influential journal Aircraft recorded its view that ‘the attempted flight to England was a publicity stunt, and an ill-advised one at that’.62 And this was a widely held view!

  ‘I cannot forget,’ he later recorded, ‘how certain of my countrymen turned from adulants to defaments almost overnight…The public which had been 100 per cent “Smithy” when we took off now began tossing mud and rocking the pedestal upon which they had placed me.’63

  He came to the realisation that by some strange dynamic he had previously been unaware of, there were only a few short steps between the position of being the nation’s hero and being its whipping boy.64

  Good God Almighty. It was not that the search party that finally reached the Kookaburra on the mid-afternoon of Monday, 29 April 1929, was holding out much hope of finding Anderson or Hitchcock still alive. The aviators had, after all, been missing for nigh on a fortnight in some of the most inhospitable country on the planet. It was that when they got to the Kookaburra, the scene was so appalling.

  The man under the wing, putrescent and stinking, maggots crawling into one eye socket and out the other, was Bobby Hitchcock. They could only tell it was him from the bandage wrapped around his right arm that they knew he’d had on when the plane left Alice Springs. He was lying beside a thinly scratched hole, bone dry, which had clearly been begun in the hope of finding water. While the three white men buried him where he lay, saying the Lord’s Prayer by way of religious observation, the two Aboriginal men, Sambo and Daylight, went in search of Anderson.65 An hour later, they found him—dead, bloated and burnt from the sun—lying a tragically short distance of just half a mile away, as if he had decided to walk to salvation and collapsed shortly after departure. In fact, Daylight, who was an expert tracker, was able to explain to the white men in some detail what had happened.

  This fella had left the Kookaburra carrying two empty water bottles and a cushion, and after walking 500 yards in a south-westerly direction had sat down under some scrub. At this point, Daylight said, ‘the white fella was very sick’,66 as the tracks showed that from this point, when the white man started off again, he had kept going through the scrub instead of around it, as previously. And then he had begun to crawl in circles. The white fella then threw off his coat, hat, goggles, water bottle and cushion, and kept crawling, soon abandoning his shirt, aircraft log, watch and scarf. Just 50 yards after he dropped his scarf, the crawling stopped, and here he was.

  Dead before them.

  Listening to the story, told over his body, all of them were humbled by the courage that Anderson had shown, how he had clearly fought his fate right to the bitter end. As Sergeant Douglas later described it, ‘it was clear that he kept his mind to the last, and fought against the odds, and died fighting.
His courage and determination must have been unlimited’.67

  With few words, they buried Keith Anderson, too.

  Though all the men were keen to leave this place of death as soon as possible, lest they suffer the same fate—a genuine possibility as their own supplies were low and the heat was sapping them—there remained some work to be done. Examining the plane, they found the petrol tank contained well over 20 gallons and Sergeant Douglas had no trouble in starting the engine up. Searching the interior of the plane, they were amazed to find there was still some food there; suggesting that the lack of water was so severe the flyers couldn’t get any food down. And so, pausing only long enough to cut from the rudder of the plane a small piece of fabric upon which Anderson had left a rough account of their experience, they began their sombre journey back to Wave Hill.