Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight has a reputation as one of the best Bomber Command memoirs. Charlwood was a Victorian who joined the RAAF in 1941, trained as a navigator in Canada under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and then flew in Halifaxes and Lancasters with 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds. Having survived his tour […]
An article of mine has been accepted for publication in the September 2012 issue of the Australian Journal of Politics and History, to be entitled ‘”Bomb back, and bomb hard”: debating reprisals during the Blitz’. I’m very pleased with this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s been a while since I last had an
Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia’s most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It’s probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms
Thirteen days ago, it was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin, the first and most devastating Japanese air raid on Australia. In fact, there were two air raids on 19 February 1942: one from the same carrier task force which had attacked Pearl Harbor a little over two months previously, and another later
In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the
This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the
I really thought I’d finished with this topic, but the primary sources demand one last post. In discussing the July 1938 Hobart mystery aeroplane, I suggested that it may have been a propaganda stunt by some person or persons worried about Tasmania’s lack of air defences. And it turns out that there were precedents for
Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made. In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search
So here’s a very incomplete list of mystery aircraft sightings in Australia, along with how they were interpreted at the time. For the most part I’ve only included reports which were published in the press at the time (and not those which were reported to the authorities in wartime but not publicised).
The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker’s Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939.1 As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia’s relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan
