Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (67 page)

In the meantime, the mood of several newspapers vis-à-vis the
Southern Cross
was beginning to harden, with the
Daily Guardian
leading the way, questioning whether the crew’s situation had really been so dire after all.

ULM’S TALE: THEY LIVED ON SNAILS AND GRASS ONLY 25 MILES AWAY FROM MISSION!

TOO WEAK TO MAKE SMOKE SIGNALS, THOUGH PLANES PASSING OVERHEAD SIMPLY WAITED FOR 12 DAYS HEARD EVERYTHING ON WIRELESS; MADE SMITHY GRIN

‘For a fortnight,’ it stated archly, the four men ‘have been within easy walking distance of Port George Mission. In fact, the true sensation has been the fever of apprehension of the public, not the actual plight of the flyers. A startling, but happily not tragic, jest has been played on public emotion by circumstance and by the failure or inability of the four missing men to show signals to searching planes which passed and re-passed the locality where the
Southern Cross
lay unseen…The [searching pilots] are reported as being amazed that at no time were they given any smoke signals from Kingsford Smith and his party.’
³⁸

The truth was, not all the journalists in the
Guardian
‘s Philip Street offices felt happy about the slant the paper was taking on the story, as it was practically accusing Smithy and Ulm and the others of fabricating the whole thing, but on the other hand they understood.
³⁹
The
Sun
had prospered mightily in recent times with the exclusive deal it had with Kingsford Smith and Ulm as the principal engine that had sold millions of extra papers, and this was the
Guardian
‘s perfect opportunity to turn things around. Certainly, it was tough on Smithy and Ulm, but all was fair in love and newspaper wars.

And certainly, the
Sun
, in many ways, redressed the balance by now publishing the airmen’s ‘exclusive reports’ on their front page, with Ulm’s account of such things as how, when the
Canberra
arrived overhead, ‘we tore open packages of food like wild beasts’.
⁴⁰
The
Sun
presented none of the queries and doubts that were being posed by other papers, and simply milked the story for all it was worth—which was plenty, as circulation continued to soar. The
Sun
focused very little on the fact that Anderson and Hitchcock were still missing. For the
Guardian
, it was front-page news, the main story of the day.

There is a visitor for you, Mr Garlick, and here is her card.

John Garlick, the Chief Civic Commissioner of Sydney and the head of the Citizens Southern Cross Rescue Committee, looked at it and recognised the name immediately. It was Bon Hilliard, the fiancée of Keith Anderson. For all that, he still kept her waiting in an anteroom in the town hall for an hour before receiving her, but finally she could be put off no longer. She was slim, pretty, blue-eyed and furious.

‘Was the
Canberra
out looking for Keith and Bobby Hitchcock yesterday?’ she wanted to know.

The commissioner had to confess that he wasn’t certain.

‘
Why
aren’t you certain? Aren’t
you
the one who should be certain, above all?’

The commissioner, staggered at her anger and upset, tried to detail what he had done to find the missing plane.

‘And you should do it, too!’ Bon told him, before leaving.
⁴¹
The
Guardian
delighted in reporting the conversation the following day. The
Sun
ignored it.

And finally, at Coffee Royal, this was what heaven felt like:
sleep
under a mosquito net that kept the beggars out,
food
in their bellies, and the knowledge that they were found and would soon be on their way home. Further lifting their spirits was the knowledge that, after everything the
Southern Cross
had been through, she was still in good shape. With petrol restored to her, she once again came to life and, with one of her side engines at full throttle, Kingsford Smith was able to turn her round from the spot she had been stuck in for the previous two weeks, and point her in the opposite direction whence she came. When they had landed, Smithy had had no more than 100 yards of free space to work with. Now, courtesy of the work the men had put in over the previous days with the axes and shovels that had also been dropped—and their new-found strength from the food—he had a little over 200 yards of serviceable runway.

After eighteen days in that godforsaken part of the planet, they were away! In no more than a minute, the mud, the mosquitoes and the monotony of their swampy prison had been left behind, and an hour and a half later, they were in Derby. The joy of landing back in civilisation, however, was tempered by the news that there was
still
no sign of Anderson and Hitchcock. What was more, there was a telegram waiting for them, from John Cantor, which hit them like a hard punch to the solar plexus:

The boys sent Keith to look for you. For God’s sake look for him and Bob.
⁴²

And they learned for the first time about the scurrilous attacks that had been made on them by the
Guardian.
They were appalled and outraged in equal measure—and Kingsford Smith and Ulm quickly cabled instructions to their solicitor in Sydney, Eric Campbell, to institute legal proceedings against the paper, as well as its printer, Clyde Packer. They sought a total of £20,000 in damages.
⁴³

At least, they learned, the pride of the Qantas fleet, the de Havilland DH.50J
Atalanta
G-AUHE, was about to leave Brisbane to join the search for Anderson and Hitchcock, and another five decrepit RAAF DH.9A planes had left Laverton. And they wanted to join them immediately.

Wiser heads prevailed, however, and they were persuaded to get at least a couple of days’ medical attention with proper sleep and rest, while the
Southern Cross
had work done on her, before they would be in shape to do anything at all.

Success, at last…

On the morning of 17 April 1929, Pilot Percy ‘Skipper’ Moody—none other than Smithy’s old flying companion from Royal Flying Corps days, with whom he had taken the salute from the Life Guard in Whitehall—took off from Brisbane’s Eagle Farm aerodrome in a brand new de Havilland DH.61 Giant Moth, named
Apollo
, on the inaugural Qantas service from Brisbane to Charleville. They were bearing just one passenger, 91-year-old Alexander Kennedy, who had been Qantas’s first passenger seven years before, and 1004 postal items, in its first link to the coast. On that first flight of the new service, the speed averaged 97 miles per hour, which was a 50 per cent increase on the speed registered on the inaugural Qantas flight in 1922.
⁴⁴
Still, of the many hold-the-phone things about this plane, the most blessed was that it was the first one in Australia to have, if you can believe it, an internal lavatory! No more would the company’s passengers after long flights be seen to frequently burst forth and sprint towards old tin sheds.
⁴⁵
Broadly, Qantas customers had gone from being fellow aviators, as they had been in the early years of operation, to being genuine passive passengers, who could begin to relax.

Qantas had taken a step up again.

Four days after that first launch, however, on the morning of 21 April, Lester Brain, with a two-man crew, was flying the
Atalanta
—which had been chartered by the Sydney Citizens Rescue Committee to join the search for the
Kookaburra
, as well as sponsored by the
Guardian
—over a particularly barren part of the Tanami Desert about halfway between Alice Springs and Wyndham. Brain was a new breed of pilot—the first man hired by Qantas to fly their planes
not
to have flown in the war—and he was a careful, considered type of man far removed from the hard-drinking larrikin type.
⁴⁶
Before taking off, he had been sure there was plenty of water and supplies on board, should the worst come to the worst. For over a week he had reckoned that the
Kookaburra
would be located in this part of the country and he was keeping an eagle-eye out for any sign that his theory might be correct.

And now, from a distance of about 60 miles, he really did spot something odd. It was a smudge of smoke rising slowly from the south-west. He knew this was a region of Australia where there were no habitations and no blacks as there was no available water, so the smoke was definitely worth investigating. In the cabin, advised of the smoke they were going to investigate, the
Atalanta
‘s mechanic, P.H. Compston, was immediately reminded of a conversation he’d had that morning with an old Aboriginal man at Wave Hill station, where they were flying from.

‘You been hunting dead fella,’ the old man said. ‘Where you fly?’

Compston pointed south, to which the elder replied, ‘I see big smoke out that way, but dunno.’
⁴⁷

Altering course, it was not long before they saw burnt and still smouldering bushes and something else, Lester Brain thought—something that obviously didn’t belong in the desert.

Could it be…?

It was!

A plane! Surely, it was the
Kookaburra.
Exultant, Brain nosed his plane down, hoping to see a couple of ragged men—both of whom were close friends of his
⁴⁸
—excitedly waving their arms in the air, when he saw it. Under the starboard wing of the plane, at least in the rough shade, lay a body, belly-down.

Perhaps sleeping?

Alas…no. As the pilot flew back and forth at a height of just 15 feet above the stricken aircraft, there was not the tiniest sign of movement from whoever it was—though Brain was almost certain it was Anderson. What he was in no doubt about now was that the person was dead. His face was burnt black, his head resting on his right arm, while his left arm appeared to be beneath his body. But where was the other man? From the air he could see the crisscrossing tracks back and forth where the plane had clearly tried, but failed, to take off. It was as obvious what had happened, as it was apparent that to land his own plane on that wasteland would be suicide—the
Atalanta
would be unlikely to ever get off the ground again.

The most important thing was to get a land party in there and, after dropping by parachute water and food on the off chance that the missing man was still alive, Brain quickly headed towards Wave Hill station, 80 miles to the north.

It was Arthur Hilliard who quietly told his daughter Bon the news at their Cremorne home that evening. It was hard, darling, he knew, but they must face reality. Bon wept—of all the hard things, one of the hardest was the thought that Keith might have died without getting her telegram telling him that she still loved him and did want to marry him—but then rallied.

‘We must tell Keith’s mother how we feel,’ she said. And in short order they sent a telegram to that devastated lonely woman in Perth, now confined to her room under medical care. It read:

Do not grieve. We must be brave. Keith is magnificent.
⁴⁹

Charles Kingsford Smith and the rest of the
Southern Cross
crew were at the Wyndham airstrip, about to take off to join the search, when they were quietly told the news. The
Kookaburra
had been found in the Tanami Desert. One body located. One still missing, though, after ten days in the desert, almost certainly dead. The plane was at a point 22 degrees to the right of where Anderson had intended to go, and they had gone down 115 miles to the north-east of where anyone might have expected to find them. In the exact middle of nowhere…

It was one of the low points of Smithy’s life. For Keith and Bobby to have died was bad enough. To have died while searching for them, however, was excruciating. And there would be a lot more pain to come.

For its part, the
Guardian
was now in full cry against both Kingsford Smith and Ulm, and their key newspaper competitors. ‘Only one advantage has appeared from the tragic incidents of the Smith-Ulm venture,’ it thundered, ‘namely an increase in certain newspaper circulations. The Sydney
Sun
, the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
and the
Melbourne Herald
, have financially interested themselves in ‘exclusive world rights’, to anything written or spoken by the crew of the
Southern Cross
…and gleefully proclaim they have sold more papers.’
⁵⁰

What was to be done?

The
Guardian
had no doubt. It was nothing less than the ‘imperative duty’ of Prime Minister Bruce to
immediately
launch a public inquiry to get to the bottom of how the whole disaster occurred, and how it could be prevented from occurring again.

So great had the public outcry become, and the accusations that were flying back and forth, that the following day Stanley Bruce did indeed announce that an official Air Inquiry Committee would be formed to investigate the affair. The committee’s terms of reference included, crucially, ‘to investigate all aspects of the flight from its start to the landing at Coffee Royal’, and to ‘search out thoroughly all facts concerning the deaths of Anderson and Hitchcock’. (On the subject of those dead airmen, Prime Minister Bruce announced a short time afterwards that a fresh expedition would be sent into the nation’s interior to retrieve their bodies.)