Lores Bonney: Brisbane housewife who conquered the world

With worldwide recognition, Google has honoured Lores Bonney, a Brisbane housewife whose high-flying adventures took her through jungle storms, mountain fogs, across vast deserts and seemingly endless African swamps as one of the world’s great aviators.

Lores Bonney was a bored Brisbane housewife who lusted for travel, adventure and excitement. So she put down her apron and rolling pin and became a record-breaking pilot flying her tiny biplane around the world.

Last week 122 years after she was born, Google honoured Australia’s Queen of the Skies by using her stylised image on the home page of its search engine.

It was worldwide recognition for a Queenslander whose adventures took her through jungle storms, mountain fogs, across vast deserts and seemingly endless African swamps.

Lores was introduced to the joy of flight by her husband’s second cousin Bert Hinkler, the Bundaberg foundry worker who for a time was hailed as the greatest aviator in the world.

Lores Bonney flew high into the history books

On March 8, 1928, following the first solo flight from England to Australia, Hinkler visited the offices of the Brisbane Courier to collect a cheque for £1000 as a reward from newspaper readers. He then drove over to Jordan Terrace, Bowen Hills for a luncheon party at the grand home Montana, where Lores lived with her husband Harry Bonney.

Lores hung on every word as Hinkler described his travels; of how he had flown through the sulphur fumes of Mount Vesuvius, how he had twice landed in the Sahara and how, heading towards Myanmar, he had swooped again and again through thick sun-drenched clouds of what looked like shimmering gold. Soon Hinkler took Lores into the air for the first time in his tiny Avro Avian biplane that now hangs in the foyer of the Queensland Museum.

Lores called that first joy flight ``the answer to my dreams’’.

``I adored birds,’’ she said, ``and there I was literally feeling like one.’’

Lores Bonney, the Brisbane aviator, at the controls of her Gipsy Moth.

Lores was born Maude Rubens in Pretoria, South Africa on November 20, 1897, and came to Melbourne with her parents in 1903. She married Harry Bonney in 1917 and settled into the life of a Brisbane socialite.

But childless and bored she was inspired by Hinkler’s visit.

She couldn’t drive but at weekends, while Harry was playing golf, she would hitch early morning rides with her milkman to Eagle Farm and take flying lessons.

Harry and Lores then bought a patched-up single engine Gipsy Moth biplane from Cedric Hill, a former Brisbane Grammar student, who in 1930 had flown it in a failed attempt to break Hinkler’s 15-day England-Australia record. She renamed Hill’s plane ``My Little Ship’’.

In 1931 Lores flew it 1600km from Brisbane to Wangaratta in northern Victoria, to visit her father, in the longest flight ever made by an Australian woman. The following year she became the first woman to circumnavigate Australia by air and on April 10, 1933 she set off in her little ``ship’’ from Archerfield aerodrome aiming to become the first woman to fly from Australia to England.

Bert Hinkler in a procession down Queen Street, Brisbane after his epic 1928 flight from England to Australia. A few days later he encouraged Lores Bonney to try flying for herself.

With a belted leather coat covering a blouse and a scarf draped around her neck, Lores looked pale and drawn at takeoff.

She suffered food poisoning in Singapore and crashed into the sea after avoiding a herd of buffalo on a Thai beach. After extensive repairs to the plane, she finally landed at London’s Croydon Airport on June 21.

Four years later, in a small German Klemm aircraft, Lores made the first ever flight from Brisbane to Cape Town.

Lores Bonney in later years with a photograph of her celebrating another aviation triumph.

World War II and failing eyesight stymied further adventures and her marriage failed. But near the end of her long life, Lores would sit on the balcony of her Gold Coast home, her eyes dancing as hang gliders waltzed before her over a nearby headland at Miami.

Lores died in 1994 aged 96.

Grantlee Kieza’s best-selling biography of Bert Hinkler is published by HarperCollins/ABC Books.