NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, pages 191 and 192 are a report submitted by Constable A. E. McLean of Dartmoor police station. He is passing on information about a mystery aircraft and a ship offshore, seen or heard by multiple witnesses at Nelson, on the southwestern coast of Victoria, near the South Australian border. His informant is […]
Following a thread provided by John Ptak on Twitter led me to the above image of ‘The great air-liner of the future’, published in The Sphere (London), 19 September 1925, 24–25. I agree with John: it’s an unusually fabulous image of the future of aviation, and I’d add unusually optimistic for Britain (though not uniquely
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
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
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
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.
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
One hundred years ago, less a few days, a police constable named Wright saw two aeroplanes flying over Nyang in the Mallee, in north-western Victoria. There is no longer any such place — it, or at least its station, was renamed Torrita (above) in 1921 — and nor were there any aeroplanes. Or at least,
This is the cover of the November 1937 issue of an American pulp magazine called Dare-Devil Aces. I vaguely knew about the existence of these aviation adventure magazines, or air pulps, but I’d assumed they were filled with stories of chivalric air combat of the Great War. Many undoubtedly were, but that’s not what this
The State Library of Queensland identifies this image as ‘R.A.A.F. Mosquito bombers, ca. 1945′; I suspect it’s from a RAAF march and flypast put on for the Third Victory Loan in the centre of Brisbane on 6 April 1945. On that occasion, according to the Courier-Mail, The veteran Lancaster bomber ‘G. for George,’ will lead
