A Qantas chip off the old block: daughter’s tales of airline birth

All that Wendy Miles has of the £6850 investment that helped launch Qantas in 1920 is a treasured block of wood.

Wendy Miles, the daughter of Qantas founder Sir Hudson Fysh, in Sydney on Monday – the airline’s 100th anniversary. Picture: John Feder

All that’s left of the £6850 investment that helped launch Qantas in 1920 that’s come down to Wendy Miles, daughter of Sir Hudson Fysh, the founder of the Flying Kangaroo, is a treasured block of wood.

Covered with the faint handwriting of Sir Hudson, it once formed part of an engine bearer in one of the airline’s early Avro planes.

For Ms Miles, the memento from the planes that spent their first years landing in Longreach is testament to the longevity of the airline.

The Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, Qantas, was inaugurated in 1920 by Sir Hudson during a meeting in Brisbane.

“With all our optimism, little did we founders dream that Qantas would enjoy the success it has, nor that air transport be where it is today, bridging land and sea and conquering the oceans, connecting the whole world by a network of fast air communications,” Sir Hudson wrote.

One of its first investors, Alexander Kennedy, would only stump up the cash if he could be the first passenger on the first flight. Ms Miles remembers well the hot dusty days in Longreach, before the airline moved to Brisbane and then on to Sydney.

“Qantas is one of Australia’s great stories. We hear all about Ned Kelly and things that go bad, but we don’t often hear of the good things,” she said.

Ms Miles, speaking on the airline’s 100th anniversary on Monday, said the early days were very tough on the pilots in the isolation of Longreach.

“There was nothing in ­Longreach for them to do once they’d come back from their flights. They couldn’t drink,” she said. “The pub was the social place in Longreach to go and chat, and that was a tremendous problem for the early pilots.”

But Ms Miles, 90, said despite the success of the business her long-suffering mother never quite got over the slim wage her father drew from the company he ran for almost 35 years.

“One of the sad things about (Qantas) was my father never made any money out of it,” she said. “He regarded it as a national service to the outback.”

Sir Hudson with wife Elana and John and Wendy in 1936.

The thick mud of central Queensland made roads almost impassable during the rains, leaving Qantas to pick up the slack and fly landowners and doctors in and out of the area.

But with the federal aviation department in Melbourne, Sir Hudson would take a five-day train trip “to argue with them about what sort of planes they needed”.

“The department didn’t come up to Longreach to see what was happening,” Ms Miles said.

By 1935 Qantas was flying Australians internationally, from Darwin to Singapore, marking Australia’s first air link to the outside world.

In 1938 the airline had moved to Sydney, flying seaplanes out of Rose Bay.

Ms Miles said she still remembers her father taking her down by the shore early in the mornings to watch the dawn flight.

“He was a great dad in a period when my friends didn’t have dads like that. I was very blessed to have him,” she said.

“Dad used to take me down every morning to watch the flying boats go off very early in the morning, then he’d take me to the swimming pool, which was by the flying boat place in Rose Bay.”

The airline, known for its striking flying kangaroo emblem, didn’t boast the logo on its planes until 1944, first emblazoning it on the tail of flights from Sydney to Karachi.

Ms Miles remembers her father as a “very philosophical man” who would be “shocked by the avarice of today”.

“He was the sort of man he couldn’t bear people who blew their own trumpet,” she said.

“He was a great searcher after truth, that was all part of his life.”