9 September 1942

Bundaberg in south-eastern Queensland was a center for flying training during the Second World War. As a consequence, the surrounding Burnett Region is peppered with wartime crash sites.

Drury’s Anson being dismantled in Lutz’s cane field. Official records indicate it was never repaired, being struck off charge the following year. Military activities at that time were commonly photographed by civilian and military personnel (Bundaberg Library bun06577, Clifford Potter Collection).

A brick maker prior to enlisting, Flight Sergeant Thomas Peel Drury was one of many pilots who came to grief while undergoing advanced training at the RAAF’s No.8 Secondary Flying Training School (SFTS) in Bundaberg. Continue reading “9 September 1942”

Project 1381

Surrounded in every direction by sugar cane fields, the steel and concrete remnants atop Charlies Hill south of Home Hill (North Queensland) reveal little now of the anxieties that led to its construction, nor the secrecy that once surrounded the operations of this former wartime radar station. Continue reading “Project 1381”

That tabua

It is not generally known that the Queensland Museum holds the most comprehensive and important collection of Charles Kingsford-Smith memorabilia, none of which have seen the light of day since returning to Australia on 9th June 1975 (coinciding with the anniversary of the first Pacific flight). Continue reading “That tabua”

GAF Jindivik programme, August 1966

bin saves

I cannot be sure when or where it was exactly that I retrieved these, but I am guessing this might have been around 1995 during the Maribyrnong Munitions Factory or RAAF Laverton closures. Whichever, I simply couldn’t let these Kodachrome slides get carted off for land-fill.

Dumpster-diving isn’t taught to museum studies students, and is never likely to be. That’s a shame because museum employees are often – as happened in this instance – given privileged access to important sites before they’re irrevocably altered, or lost.

Here we have a uncommon glimpse of an era when state-of-the-art fighter aircraft were locally hand-crafted under the one roof by tradesmen employed on the basis of their skills, rather than their age. Continue reading “bin saves”

Unsolved

In late March 1943 fifty-one year old baker Rigas Carsas and thirty-six year old engineer Roy Clarke, both from the nearby sugar milling town of South Johnstone, were fishing at night near the mouth of Liverpool Creek in North Queensland when they noticed a bright flash in the sky.[1] Continue reading “Unsolved”

Blast from the past

 

In 1995 the Commonwealth provided National Estate funding for a pilot study of Victoria’s aeronautical and astronautical heritage, the first state-level thematic study of its kind. This investigation identified more than a hundred significant sites, three of which related to astronautics. The latter included the Graytown Proof & Experimental Establishment near Puckapunyal; the Ravenhall Static Test Facility in Melbourne’s Deer Park; and the rocket static test site within the former Explosives Factory at Maribyrnong, these last two having been operated by the same agency. Continue reading “Blast from the past”