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AM Black, 4 April 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 109 is a copy of a letter from A. M. Black to Major Hogan of the 'Intelligence Service'. It's undated, but NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 108 (a cover letter from military intelligence to naval intelligence) says that it was written on 10 April 1918; the incident it relates to seems to have happened back on 1 April. Black's letter is terse and doesn't bother to explain who he is or why he writes, just that he is passing on some notes from 'E.V.G.' (a scrawled annotation here says, I think, 'Greenway') who is 'now at Tarwin but who was down at Woodside last week'. These notes are on the following page, NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 110, and read:

1st. April Ls [lights?] in Hills also L on Hummock east of our place
Air Craft flying from West to East at 9 o'clock fired Star Shell burn over sea.
Report from E.V.G.
Newlands also sending report.

The last two lines are presumably added by Black, who also adds some further details in his letter:

  • E.V.G. 'also mentioned a light in the shape of' (here there is a typed representation of an L-shaped group of 5 or 6 dots)
  • E.V.G. 'said the noise of the plane was quite distinct & well as it being clearly seen' (presumably '&' is meant to be 'as')
  • 'Light in hummocks referred to was signalling by code (unknown to E.V.G.)'
  • 'Next day on searching the spot was seen -- hole in sand and fresh marks'

Who is Black? He's clearly a civilian and not writing in any official capacity; he wanted E.V.G. to write a fuller report, but instead only got a few 'remarks' from him 'just before leaving for my train'. He writes from St Kilda, a Melbourne suburb (the house is still there and looks quite grand); there is an 'A.M. Black, Tarwin' mentioned in The Age in May as the seller of some dairy cows. So I would guess he is a grazier. From his brevity I suspect he had already been in contact with Major Hogan, though not enough to warrant informality. He could have been following up an earlier letter which mentioned E.V.G.'s sighting, or perhaps he had been in more regular contact, patriotically alerting the 'Intelligence Service' to anything which he thought warranted their attention. Certainly on this occasion Hogan not only thought Black's information interesting, but worth passing on to the Navy (for his part, Lieutenant-Commander Latham, the head of naval intelligence, 'should be glad of further information'). E.V.G. (and Newlands) is probably a farmer too, but it's hard to say for sure.
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Morris, 3 April 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 1011 is a police report from Sergeant W. Morris of Gosford, north of Sydney in the NSW Central Coast region. It's an account of a mystery aeroplane sighting made by Lily Moir, a 23 year old woman living with her mother on a farm 1.5 miles east of Gosford. Shortly after 4am on the night of 23 March, Moir 'saw a light up high above the horizon, apparently a little north of Terrigal Haven over the sea border'. It 'appeared like a star travelling towards her, and seemed to swerve up and down like sea waves for an instant, and then disappear downwards'; yet (rather contradictorially) 'the light was unlike a star', and could not have been a meteor because it 'travelled horizontally towards her in waves'. Though Morris sought confirmation, there are no other reports from other witnesses.
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War Intelligence No. T4 (extract), 30 March 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 556 is an extract from a weekly military intelligence report compiled for the Australian section of the Imperial General Staff, which has been forwarded on to the Navy. (It contains information up to 30 March, but it's possible that it was compiled a day or two later.) It summarises a report by D. Burke, a schoolteacher from Raminea, Port Esperance, near the southern tip of Tasmania, of sounds heard in the air on 22 March (the day after Constable Wright's sighting at Nyang). Out of the 11 or so witnesses, 10 thought it sounded like 'an immense flock of birds', but one that 'resembled the sound of an engine', travelling south to north. After whatever it was had passed, two guns were heard firing far off to the south-west. It was a cloudy day and nothing could be seen.
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Anonymous, 25 March 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 871 is a copy of an anonymous letter sent to the Minister of Defence in Melbourne in reference to reports 'in the press on Saturday that two aeroplanes were seen flying over Nyang' -- likely either the Argus or the Age. Probably the latter, since it added a report from the Central Flying School at Laverton (well, Point Cook) saying it wasn't one of theirs, and the letter writer says 'This may only have been a trial flight by our own men, and again it may not'.

But the aeroplanes are not the real point here; they're not even mentioned again. Instead the writer informs the Minister of 'the fact that a late Officer in the German Army, by the name of Schefferdecker (Farmer) lives either at Cow Plains or Murrayville -- a few stations further on' from Nyang. He had only arrived in Australia a few months before the war. The writer wants the Minister to see 'that the matter is thoroughly investigated' -- though what, exactly, Schefferdecker is supposed to have done is never specified. Still, something must be done about it:

I have given you the information which I know to be a fact, and it remains with you to see that the enemy officer is interned and not allowed to enjoy the same privileges as the parents of the boys from that district who are now at the front fighting; doubtless many more would enlist if it were not for the fact that so many Germans are permitted to profit by the freedom we are fighting for.

This seems to be the heart of the matter: this Schefferdecker may not have actually done anything wrong, but he is a German and the fact that he remains free is an affront, and it's no wonder that new recruits for the AIF are drying up. This month in fact saw the lowest recruitment figures for the war to date -- only 1500 across the entire country -- so perhaps the writer was getting at some confluence of fears to do with the war draining manpower away and leaving the nation defenceless. Or else they had very cannily happened on a theme which was already creating much official alarm and despondency down in Melbourne, especially after the failure of the bitterly divisive second conscription plebiscite in December 1917.
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report, J. Wright, 22 March 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 878, is a report submitted by Constable J. Wright of Ouyen police station, in the Mallee region of northwestern Victoria:

I have to report that whilst I was in the vicinity of Nyang about thirty miles from Ouyen at 4 30 pm on 21.3.18 I saw two flying machines pass overhead. They were up an [sic] great height & appeared to be about twenty yards apart. I did not hear the noise of the machines. They proceeded in a Westerly direction & as the sky was particularly clear, the machines were easily discernible.

And that's all Wright wrote. His superiors forwarded his report down to Melbourne, where, three days later, it was received at the Navy Office. There, Lieutenant-Commander J. G. Latham, a former lawyer (and future chief justice) who was head of naval intelligence, read it and commented: 'Reads true'.
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Memo, E. L. Piesse, 5 May 1917

When casting about for some way to mark the centenary of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic, an obvious idea was to post-blog it, especially since it's something I haven't done in a while. For new readers, post-blogging is my term for taking a historical event spanning weeks or months and posting about how it was represented in the press at the time, day by day but exactly one hundred (or whatever) years later. So the Sudeten Crisis seventy years later, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz seventy years later, the phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1913 seventy years later. This is great for restoring a sense of what people (via the press) thought was happening and the pace in which it happened, rather than the highly foreshortened hindsight we tend to get from conventional historical narratives. But I've mined Trove on this topic pretty thoroughly in the past, both for the blog and for publication, and a quick check suggests there's not too much new information there. Besides which, the newspapers tell only part of the story: there's a wealth of material in the National Archives of Australia which shed light on what the Australian military thought was happening and what they did about it.

Fortuitously, since I carried out my original research the main archival file I used, MP1049/1, 1918/066, 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights, etc', has been digitised and is available for free online -- all 1113 pages of it! This gave me the idea to post-blog the panic, but a bit differently: by focusing on the evolution of the archival record, rather than the press one. It will still be in real time, that is I will post about events exactly a century after they happened, but instead of the 'events' being the publication of a newspaper article, it will be the creation of an archived document. How (or whether) this will work exactly remains to be seen; I will probably still do a little bit of Troving, for example, because (I argue) the events of the war in Europe supply the crucial context for understanding the way the mystery aeroplane panic evolved here in Australia.

Post-blogging is very time intensive, however, and I do have to earn a living. So, rather than going through all 1113 pages, blog-post by blog-post, I've decided to add another twist, by posting about only those individual documents I cited in my peer-reviewed article on the panic, about 30 or so, a far more manageable number. My ex post facto justification for this is that I can then talk about how and why I used each document, what work it did for me in my writing and my argument.
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As I discussed in a previous post, the arrival of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 suddenly made the Aerial League of the British Empire's foray into wartime propaganda films irrelevant. Yet the bizarre coincidence that the film happened to give a prominent place to the time and date of the Armistice suggested the possibility that the League's investment might be recouped by somehow marketing Eleven, Eleven, Eleven as a novelty. The sole mention of the film in the British press, in the Preston Herald in December 1918, was pretty clearly planted with a friendly journalist in an attempt to do just that.1
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  1. Possibly through the offices of E. Jerome Dyer, in effect the film's producer; his name turns up in the Preston press quite frequently in connection with the Vegetable Products Committee which was active there. [↩]

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This summary of an unreleased and untitled film is from the 'Grave and Gay' column of the Preston Herald for 7 December 1918:

In this film a man dreams that England is under German rule, and various scenes are shown depicting the organised brutality of the Boche. But, in the dream, there is a movement to throw off the German rule. The head of the movement is a chemist and inventor who has discovered a new force. Secret meetings are held in his underground laboratory, on the walls of which is a huge placard with the words, 'Eleven, Eleven, Eleven!' It is decided that the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is to be the hour of the successful uprising and of England's freedom.1

A couple of things make this interesting, or at least unusual. One is that 'These scenes had all been actually photographed long before the armistice', and so the prominence of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the plot was both 'very remarkable and beyond the possibility of dispute'.2 The other is that the film was produced by the Aerial League of the British Empire, which seems hard to explain, given the apparent lack of any aerial theme at all. So what was going on here?
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  1. Preston Herald, 7 December 1918, 2. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]

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Yesterday there was quite a bit of activity on Twitter in response to the following tweet:

Yes, it's our old friends, the wooden bombs! A number of people linked either to me or to one of my posts on the topic -- the first one trying to pin down the reality of the story in response to a Snopes debunking, the second one reviewing Pierre-Antoine Courouble's book which, for my money, did just about do that, and the third one passing on an appeal from Jean Dewaerheid, Peter Haas and Courouble for further eyewitnesses, which, as far as I know did not eventuate. From time to time these get linked from Reddit or some listicle site, making them probably the most popular posts on Articles, but it's all heat and no light. However, the Twitter discussion did uncover one new source of information which would seem to confirm the origin of the wooden bomb story as a British psychological warfare operation.
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NAA: A2023, A38/2/147/677

I ended the previous post in this series with the tease:

In a final post, I will discuss what [Alban] Roberts called his airship, and what it might mean.

That was over two months ago! I think it's time to finally reveal the answer to this question.

Errol Martyn, who has written what must be the fullest account of Roberts' career, says that around the time of the airship's tethered test, it was 'patriotically named Australia 1'.1 He gives no source for this name and I couldn't find a reference to it in Trove or elsewhere. In fact, most of the press accounts don't call it anything other than 'the airship' or 'the dirigible'. But not all:

Mr A. J. Roberts's airship, the White Australia, left the Show Ground yesterday under its own gas [...]2

and

The trial flight of Mr A. J. Roberts' airship, White Australia, from the Sydney Showground, ended abruptly on Sunday afternoon.3

I find this extraordinary. Australia's first airship was named for a racist policy of ensuring an Australian nation free from non-Europeans. Why?
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  1. Errol W. Martyn, A Passion for Flight: New Zealand Aviation Before the Great War, Volume 3: The Joe Hammond Story and Military Beginnings 1910-1914 (Upper Riccarton: Volplane Press, 2013), 98. [↩]
  2. Sun (Sydney), 5 July 1914, 4. [↩]
  3. Maitland Daily Mercury, 6 July 1914, 6. [↩]