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
A few years back I published an article, ‘The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935’, in Twentieth Century British History. At that time I was given a link for free downloads which I provided for those without instiutional access. But it turns out that (1) I wasn’t really
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
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
In 2016 I contributed a chapter on the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic to Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, an edited collection published by Melbourne University Press. While I’d already published a peer-reviewed article on the same topic, this was broader in scope as it attempted to provide a transnational narrative and
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,
