Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (64 page)

It was no April Fool’s joke—not bloody likely it wasn’t. On the morning of Easter Monday, 1 April 1929, Australia awoke to the news—emblazoned across every front page in the land—that the
Southern Cross
was missing, and had very likely crash-landed in extremely rough country.

Six-column bold-face headlines in subsequent editions told much of the story.

SOUTHERN CROSS FORCED DOWN IN BAD COUNTRY
³

SILENCE UNBROKEN

SEARCH FOR THE SOUTHERN CROSS
⁴

VEIL OF SILENCE

NO NEWS OF SOUTHERN CROSS
⁵

OMINOUS SILENCE: WHERE IS ‘VETERAN’ SOUTHERN CROSS?
⁶

GRAVEST FEARS FOR SAFETY OF SOUTHERN CROSS CREW
⁷

It was Sydney’s
Sun
that went biggest with the story announcing, with huge headlines across the entire page, that at dawn of that very day, a rescue plane, sponsored by the
Sun
in conjunction with the Melbourne
Herald
, would be on its way to find Smithy and the boys.

Which was to the good, because it seemed unlikely that the Federal government would be sending any search planes. That much had been made clear by Prime Minister Stanley Bruce who, when accosted at his front door while wearing a bathrobe and slippers by a
Daily Telegraph
journalist, and asked why the government wasn’t doing anything about finding the
Southern
Cross
, had shrugged his shoulders and replied that it was not for the government to ‘interfere in private ventures…’

His response was not good enough for many people in Sydney, particularly. For it was there that a friend of Smithy’s by the name of John Garlick, who was also Sydney’s Chief Civic Commissioner—effectively a State government-imposed lord mayor, after Sydney Council had been accused of graft—started up a Citizens Southern Cross Rescue Committee and held a mass meeting at Sydney Town Hall to raise money to launch a serious search.

‘Australia’s national heroes are in danger,’ he cried. ‘They are in dire distress. It is the duty of the Australian people to hurry to their rescue.’
⁸

And so said all of them. And so said all of their wallets.

No less than £2000 was promised in the first twenty minutes of the meeting. Just two days after that, with thousands of Sydneysiders contributing everything from a shilling to several pounds, they had gathered £7000. With that money, they were able to hire the
Canberra
, a de Havilland DH.61 Giant Moth six-passenger, single-engined biplane, boasting at the controls a distinguished former Australian Flying Corps pilot by the name of Les Holden (of the Holden’s Motor Body Builders family) and his crew, to begin the search. For his part, Smithy’s old boss at West Australian Airways, Major Norman Brearley, was quick to send his three best pilots out in three of his planes—half of his fleet—to search the Kimberley. Within a day, pilots Jim Woods, Bertie Heath and Eric Chater—all former colleagues and good friends of Smithy from his days of flying with West Australian Airways—were on their way, each searching his allotted part of the map, before returning to refuel and going out again to the next part. (The flight of Woods was the one sponsored by the Sydney
Sun
and Melbourne
Herald.
) Time was of the essence. After all, the natives in those parts were said to be cannibals!
⁹

At Arabella Street, the wider Kingsford Smith family had gathered at the homestead. This was a crisis, and a time for them all to come together. Such was their confidence in Chilla, they felt certain he would have found a way to come down all right, and it was just a question of finding him. They were all conscious that he had been ill with the flu for the week before departure.

‘I do hope he has not suffered a relapse,’ William had told the
Daily Guardian
the day before. Then, pointing out his newly renovated house, all of which had been done at Chilla’s direction and expense, he proudly added, ‘Not many of the outside public know this side of Charlie’s nature. They know him only as a hero of the air.’
¹⁰

Between them, the Kingsford Smith clan decided that Leofric would be the one liaising with the authorities to ensure that everything that could be done, was done. In the meantime, Catherine stayed glued to the radio, hoping for news, while William manned the phone, fielding no fewer than fifty calls from family, friends and journalists in the first day. The board of Australian National Airways had equally come together at their offices in Martin Place and were meeting with radio and flying experts to try to narrow down just where the
Southern Cross
could be.

Meanwhile, watching all the developments extremely closely was Keith Anderson, who of course knew the country around where Smithy and that prick Ulm had disappeared very well, courtesy of his time with West Australian Airlines. A regular at Sydney’s Customs House Hotel, situated close to Circular Quay, Anderson told anyone who would listen that he was convinced that the
Southern Cross
would be found somewhere in the Port George area, because he had analysed all the communications from the plane, and it was obvious what had happened. They had overshot Wyndham in the storm, hit the coast, and then bounced back and forth looking for it, until they ran out of petrol.

‘I would give anything to be able to go and look for the boys,’ Anderson said in the presence of the hotelier, John Cantor.

‘Right,’ Cantor immediately replied. ‘I will back you.’
¹¹

And indeed, Anderson had been convincing enough in his analysis that it wasn’t long before Cantor raised some funds from friends and acquaintances who also believed it made sense to send Anderson in his new Widgeon to start looking. And no matter that the plane was yet to receive its official certificate of registration. There was no time to worry about paperwork.

Anderson began immediate preparations, engaging—surprisingly, although he was in desperate need of any work he could get—Bobby Hitchcock to go with him as his mechanic. They were going to find Smithy!

And then, in response to the general outcry, the government relented and the prime minister at last ordered the seaplane carrier HMAS
Albatross
, which was then berthed in Sydney, to head to the other side of the massive continent with six RAAF No. 101 Fleet Co-operation Flight Supermarine Seagull III amphibians on board to begin searching the area where the
Southern Cross
was thought to have disappeared. In the meantime, luggers had left the rich pearling grounds off the West Australian coast and begun searching the coast for any sign of wreckage that might have washed ashore.

Now, Australia watched, and waited. Anxiously…

SOUTHERN CROSS MEN HAVE NOW BEEN MISSING OVER 40 HOURS:

NATION’S ANXIETY

GRIM SILENCE STILL BROODS OVER LOST PLANE

DESPERATE SEARCH FOR MISSING AVIATORS—

ANOTHER DISAPPOINTING DAY
¹²

What no-one could work out was why there had been no contact from the
Southern Cross.
After all, it had both a wireless and wireless operator on board. What on earth were they doing out there? Were they alive? Were they dead, or horribly injured, perhaps? What on earth were they
doing
?!

Basically, they were starving, even as the mosquitoes feasted. Slowly and surely. The sandwiches were gone after just the first couple of days, and the baby food had to be divided into tiny portions and mixed with water to make it last longer. After an attempt by ‘Mac’ to hunt for game with his revolver came to nothing, they decided to go after rather smaller game. Specifically, well, there were…snails. No, they didn’t provide as much meat as the birds or kangaroos Mac had been hoping for, but by God they were a whole lot easier to catch and could be found low down on the mangrove trees. Though they tasted godawful, and were gritty with sand, once boiled up and with their shells cracked off with stones, they at least provided a tiny bit of sustenance to fuel the many activities the
Southern Cross
crew embarked upon.

The first chore was to get a fire going on the hill, and then keep wood up to it thereafter, ensuring that in the daylight hours there was always a plume of white smoke heading skywards that search planes would be able to see.

Meantime, on the first full day at ‘Coffee Royal’, as they decided to call their place, Smithy, Ulm, McWilliams and Litchfield hunkered down, accompanied by perhaps ten thousand flies that seemed keen on swarming around and crawling all over them as if they were massive dog turds on legs. Key among the men’s frustrations was that they had been unable to communicate with the outside world, even though Mac had rigged up an aerial that had allowed them to receive transmissions, on battery power alone. Hal Litchfield, meanwhile, once the storm had cleared, had been able to take their bearings from the stars, and they knew exactly where they were—latitude 15” 35’ South, longitude 124” 45’ East—about 150 miles from Derby and 300 miles due west of Wyndham. They also knew they were somewhere in the area of the Port George Mission, but had no idea where that mission lay—most frustratingly, no-one gave its position over the radio, and it was not marked on the maps they had. A brief point of discussion was whether they should go on an exploratory march to look for the mission, but lost in the wilderness as they were, ‘the dear old
Southern Cross
’, as Smithy thought of her, ‘seemed at least a home, where we should be wise to remain’.
¹³
At least, the massive wingspan of the plane would surely be easily spotted from the air when the rescuers came their way, whereas if they had been alone on the ground, they would be near invisible.

What they most needed, of course, was to solve the radio problem. There had been no trouble transmitting when the
Southern Cross
had been in the air, as the Aladdin wind-powered generators on the sides of the cockpit had provided plenty of current to the radios. But now that they were on the ground, they had to find a way to get one of the generators to turn equally fast, as the transmitter could not operate without the A/C current they provided. Smithy, a man of no little ingenuity and energy in such matters, just as he had displayed when running the Gascoyne Transport Company, took the lead in trying to solve the problem. First they detached one of the generators from its bracket on the fuselage, and then chocked up one side of the undercarriage on a log resting on rocks, before digging out beneath one of the 4-foot-diameter landing wheels. Smithy also began to carve a wooden roller to attach to the end of the generator. The theory was once they had the wheel spinning furiously, they could hold the roller against it, and that would generate enough electricity to transmit a message to the outside world. It was exhausting, back-breaking work, but they kept at it. They needed to turn the generator at about its normal speed of 2000 revolutions per minute, so they would have had to turn the big wheel about 100 times a minute. Not easy in the heat and the flies and the mud…

At least, in the meantime, they were able to listen to how the search was proceeding, and learnt that the first of the rescue planes would be leaving Derby the following day to look for them, while a launch was going to head up the Drysdale River. There was some hope that the morrow would bring succour, although no hope that the night would be anything but hell on earth as the mosquitoes now seemed to have organised themselves well enough to come at them in waves.

And then things got
really
bad: Tom McWilliams tried to cheer them all up by playing his mouth organ. At least he did so until, with their last reserves of energy for the day, the others prevailed upon him to stop.

‘A major horror of the episode,’ recorded Charles Ulm.
¹⁴

Good God, what a
place.

Another
plane
!

On Wednesday, 3 April 1929, at Drysdale Mission, 150 miles north-west of Wyndham, the residents were almost positive that the mysterious plane that had come and gone so quickly must now have returned and they rushed out in the midday sun expecting to see it.
¹⁵
But no, this was another, much smaller, single-engined plane and, after circling low, something dropped from it and landed nearby. It was a message from the pilot:

We are looking for another plane, missing since Sunday. Answer these questions in the following manner. Wave sheet to mean Yes. Place sheet flat on the ground to mean no. First question, did plane pass here? Second question, did it throw out a letter? Third question, which way did it go?
¹⁶

Up in the West Australian Airways plane, pilot Jim Woods, with none other than the still deeply worried Clive Chateau as an observer, watched carefully the response.

To the first question there was a violent waving of the sheet, meaning they had definitely seen the
Southern Cross
…

To the second question, one native placed a sheet on the ground, while another waved a sheet…meaning, Woods supposed, that the answer was indeterminate.