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 […]
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
