Australia

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Herald (Melbourne), 12 January 1924, 24

After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that's because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren't a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up sometimes.

There was one in Western Australia in 1910, another in 1918, and a relatively famous one on 10 June 1931 between Lord Howe Island to Jervis Bay. That last one was seen by Sir Francis Chichester while making the first east-west solo flight from New Zealand to Australia -- though he seems to have only reported it decades later, and even then stopped of short of claiming it actually was an airship. In 1925, another phantom airship was seen, more definitely but equally incongruously, at Myall, near the Murray River in northern Victoria.

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Articles with 'air raid' per issue, 1913-1946 (BNA)

The time has finally come to address the claim I've made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often 'air raid' (and related phrases) appeared per issue in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in each month across the First World War. The above plot, now, is how often 'air raid' appeared per issue in each year from the start of the First World War (when 'air raid' was first used) until the end of the Second. Now you can see that the first peak in 'air raid''s popularity came in 1917, at an average of 0.8 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA; and that this was followed by a second, much bigger peak in 1940 of 5.2 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA. All of which makes sense.

What's more surprising is what happened in between. From 1921 to 1934, the phrase 'air raid' almost completely disappears from BNA. At the lowest point, 1929, the average number of mentions per issue was just 0.026, or one in about 38. In other words, if you read 38 issues you might expect to read the phrase 'air raid' once, which is more than six weeks of reading a daily. If you want some absolute figures, 'air raid' appears 609 times in the 23054 issues contained in BNA for 1929. So 'air raid' was not a phrase you were at all likely to see in a newspaper in the 1920s and early 1930s.

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Victory Through Air Power

A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn't get around to lazyblogging the latter... until now.

The evening began with the half-hour short documentary Flight Plan, made in 1950 by the Australian Department of Civil Aviation, which you can watch here.

[tweet id="1375357664641773573" conversation=false]Conference jokes and airline jokes -- together at last. Yes, this is going to be a good night in...

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FE.2b CF14 at Yarram, 1918

Yesterday marked the centenary of the founding of the Royal Australian Air Force on 31 March 1921. I celebrated in the usual way (buying books, talking about myself):[tweet id="1377043532775493636" conversation=false][tweet id="1377044249552678913" conversation=false][tweet id="1377044649374715908" conversation=false]But I also decided to use the occasion to talk about something that's missing from the usual RAAF origin story, and that's the mystery aeroplane panic of 1918. [tweet id="1377045231397335041" conversation=false][tweet id="1377046196846399494" conversation=false][tweet id="1377046835257253889" conversation=false]

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Yesterday @TroveUFOBot found an obviously satirical and wholly invented account of a mystery airship seen at Dobroyd in Sydney in 1910. This is interesting enough in itself, but what got me searching was the inspiration for the article:

Everywhere just now the air is full of mystery -- of airship mystery. This is connected not so much with what is known to be accomplished in the way of aviation but rather what is suspected to have been accomplished, and to be kept secret for use in war time by some one or other of the great nations of the earth. A few days ago there came a rumour from the Pacific (which, by the way is a good wide place to start a rumour from) of traces of the visit of an airship having been discovered on what the late Mr Daniel O'Rourke would have called 'a dissolute' island.1

I soon found this 'rumour from the Pacific', which turned out to be an account of (perhaps) two mystery airships seen in the Lau islands of Fiji, then a British colony on 17 March 1910.
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  1. St George Call (Kogorah, NSW), 30 April 1910, 6. [↩]

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Sydney, c1941

In the Second World War, Japanese aircraft carried out over one hundred air raids on Australia, the most deadly of which, by far, were the first Darwin raid on 19 February 1942, which killed 236 people, and the raid on Broome on 6 March, which killed 88. The major population centres further south were never bombed, mainly because they were much further south. (The only other town of any sized attacked from the air, in three very small raids in July, was Townsville, 1350km north of Brisbane.) But after the fall of Singapore on 15 February, there was certainly an expectation of attacks, if not invasion. One indication of this is the civil defence schemes from the early years of the war that were beefed up and put into action now. All those things that Australians had learned about in the news from the 1940-41 Blitz -- blackouts, shelters, air raid wardens -- now became familiar here, if on a smaller scale. (Though the blackout was usually more of a brownout.) We don't know what would have happened had the southern cities been hit by air raids, but we can guess at how things would have started, based on behaviour during false air raid alarms which occurred early in the war with Japan.
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Sunday Post, 12 May 1935, 14

I recently came across a few more examples from 1920s and 1930s newspapers of the 'Red Baron' being used in reference to Manfred von Richthofen, which I suggested undermined my argument that, in essence, we call him that because of Snoopy. But instead of shrugging my shoulders I decided to get my data on and dig into some numbers. And they confirm my original conclusion: that Richthofen was not called the Red Baron during his lifetime, and it's only from the 1960s on that it became almost impossible to call him anything else.
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WA Sportsman (Perth), 9 August 1918, 3

This poem took up about an eighth of page 3 of the 9 August 1918 edition of the Perth WA Sportsman, preaching revenge on Germany for its air raids on Britain (the last of which, until the next war at least, had just taken place). It's prefaced by a claim that 'the Allies expect to soon send air fleets to bomb Berlin', likely a reference to a statement made a week earlier by Major-General Sefton Brancker that 'It is certain that the British will be able to bomb Berlin next spring'. (A week after the Armistice it was being reported that RAF bombers were 'actually in readiness to visit Berlin' when the ceasefire came through.)
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NHS Spitfire

Exactly six months ago today, I posted about some aerial theatre in the time of coronavirus. That was the first time I mentioned the pandemic on Airminded, and it is, of course, still here (Victoria is -- hopefully -- nearing the end of its second wave, with 42 new cases reported today, down from a peak of 686 on 4 August, and a total of 737 deaths), but so is the aerial theatre. The Aircraft Restoration Company's NHS Spitfire Project evolved out of the Clap For Our Carers social media movement to support NHS health workers. That ended back in May, but the NHS Spitfire is still flying around the UK (and is still looking for sponsors).
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Here's my contribution to last night's livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for #HATMAus. It was fast, furious and not always particularly accurate -- much like the film itself...

Spoilers follow (though equally there are also a lot of tweets that don't make sense without seeing what was on the screen at the time).

[tweet id="1300011047873437697" conversation=false]

Case in point: "Zeppeling"???
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