If the threat from Germans outside Australia during the First World War was small, the threat from Germans inside Australia was non-existent. There is no credible evidence at all of any espionage, subversion or sabotage activities by German-Australians. But you wouldn’t know it from the way the Australian people and their government behaved. It’s not […]
It’s been more than two weeks since I’ve posted anything on my current mystery aeroplane research, but it’s not because I haven’t been working on it. In fact it is coming along pretty well. There are still some frustrating gaps in my understanding of the archival records, but the writing is coming along. I’ve written
It has happened before that while I’m focused on some research topic but read something seemingly unrelated, that unanticipated connections serendipitously appear between the two. In this case it was while reading a collection of short stories by Arthur Machen, an influential writer of supernatural horror who wrote his greatest, and most disturbing, works in
So, to the mystery aeroplane sceptics. Again, there are some sceptical opinions to be found in the press and police reports, but relatively few. Very early on, the Age, one of Melbourne’s leading newspapers, wrote on 25 March 1918 that the defence authorities are inclined to laugh at the story told by Police Constable Wright,
What did Australians in 1918 make of the mystery aeroplane scare? What did they think the aeroplanes meant? This is a question I’ve already answered in part. There is evidence from the press that in the days before 24 April wild rumours were circulating that Australia was about to be attacked somehow by German raiders,
If the wave of reports of mystery aeroplanes after late April 1918 wasn’t sustained by newspaper reports (i.e. because there were none) then how was it sustained? Why did people from all over Australia come to hold the same belief, that German aircraft were filling the skies? There are several possible explanations. One is that
This is from a document issued by the Air Council in October 1918, ‘Identification marks on all aircraft’, FS Publication 89. I think it’s available from the National Archives in London as AIR 10/128 and AIR 10/129, but I found it in the National Archives of Australia as NAA: A1194, 19.03/6255, and because I paid
The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it’s time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery
View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I’ve used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is
In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I’ve been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office’s file pertaining to ‘Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights
