When Queensland played host to high-flyers who conquered the world

At 11.15am on December 22, 1919, Captain Ross Smith, a World War I fighter ace who had once been Lawrence of Arabia’s pilot in Palestine, arrived with his crew in the remote outback township of Longreach aboard a craft alien to almost everyone who gazed upon it.

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As Central Queensland sweltered on this summer’s day exactly 100 years ago, winds of change blew across Longreach and there were signs in heaven that the world would now be a very different place.

At 11.15am on December 22, 1919, Captain Ross Smith, a South Australian World War 1 fighter ace who had once been Lawrence of Arabia’s pilot in Palestine, arrived in the remote outback township aboard a craft alien to almost everyone who gazed upon it.

It was a two-engine Vickers Vimy that had flown from London via Darwin and won the world’s greatest air race at a time when aeroplane pilots were the astronauts of their age.

Ross Smith, his brother Keith, and two crewmen Sergeant Jim Bennett and Sergeant Wally Shiers, had left the grass runway at London’s Hounslow Heath 10 weeks earlier and had become the first men to fly from England to Australia.

Captain Ross Macpherson Smith (left) and his Bristol Fighter F2B aircraft in Palestine. Picture: Courtesy AWM P03631.013

The four would soon share a £10,000 prize from the Australian government as the first men to make the global crossing and began a celebratory tour heading south.

Longreach in the summer was vastly different to the wintry London of their departure. The aircraft was registered as G-EAOU, which the crew said stood for ``God ‘Elp All Of Us’’.

After takeoff from Hounslow on November 12 the aviators immediately ran into snow that blasted them in their open cockpits, and they were driven up to almost 2800 metres by a blizzard. Ice covered their goggles, forcing the airmen to remove them, and the four endured intense pain as they sat frozen in their seats with their bare eyes smashed by 140km/h winds. Somehow they survived to land in Lyons.

(left to right) Keith and Ross Smith with Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett in front of their Vickers Vimy aircraft at Hounslow before their flight to Australia.

The next day, Smith’s rivals, Captain Roger Douglas and Lieutenant Leslie Ross took off from Hounslow in an Alliance P2 Seabird named Endeavour. It climbed into low cloud but was aloft for only a few minutes. Both aviators were killed and the Alliance company ruined.

A Blackburn Kangaroo took off on November 21. The navigator was Captain Hubert Wilkins, already world famous for exploring the North Pole. On December 8, the machine was wrecked beyond repair and left against a mound of earth next to a Greek lunatic asylum.

On December 4, Captain Cedric ‘Spike’ Howell, a former fighter pilot, and his navigator Sergeant George Fraser, took off in their Martinsyde A Mark 1, the fastest machine in the race, capable of 240 kilometres an hour. Both men were killed near St Georges Bay, Corfu.

Sir Ross Smith and Sir Keith Smith

Smith’s death-defying crew overcame one obstacle after another. From Lyons they flew to Pisa, where heavy rain made their landing field a bog. Flying down the coast of Greece, they narrowly escaped death when the peak of an island suddenly appeared out of a cloudbank.

At Singapore the local racetrack was too small for them to make a landing so Bennett climbed out of his cockpit and shimmied down the tail section of the aircraft, hanging on with all his strength. His weight forced the tail down sharply and, as Ross brought the Vimy in hard it came to a dead stop within 100m, Bennett riding it like a runaway bronco.

Astronaut Andy Thomas with the Vickers Vimy at Adelaide Airport.

Despite all the privations and perils, the four men and their big lumbering machine touched down at Darwin at 3.50pm on December 10, having covered 18,250km in 27 days, 20 hours.

They were international heroes and the Smith brothers began preparations for a round-the-world flight starting on Anzac Day 1922 in a single-engine Vickers Viking.

But on April 13, the now Sir Ross Smith and Lieutenant Jim Bennett were killed testing the aircraft in London.

Grantlee Kieza’s 15th book, a biography of colonial governor Lachlan Macquarie, is published by HarperCollins/ABC Books

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