The birth of an airline – from humble beginnings in the vast Queensland Outback , the now iconic flying kangaroo has bounded across the skies of the world for 100 years.
Back in 1920, in the small town of Winton, the airline company QANTAS was born. The Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd was created and would be known as QANTAS from that day forward.
Its co-founders, Sir Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, said "[Qantas] was conceived in Cloncurry, born in Winton and grew up in Longreach."
And that certainly seems to be the truth, despite friendly banter as to where our beloved airline began its rise to the dizzying heights of an international airline that – until the dreaded Wuflu – carried 50 million passengers every year across the globe.
According to an article published
“ In 1919, then prime minister Billy Hughes announced a prize of 10,000 British pounds for a Great Air Race for Australians who wanted to fly home from Great Britain after World War I.
Fysh and McGinness were tasked with surveying possible aircraft landing strips across western Queensland and the Northern Territory.
As they travelled over rough terrain from Longreach to Darwin in a Ford Model T, at an average speed of 25 kilometres per day, the pair hatched a plan to establish an air service connecting remote communities. “
By 1922, the first service was connecting Charleville and Cloncurry – and the Headquarters had been established in the outback town of Longreach, home to the Qantas Founders Museum, the famous Outback Hall of Fame and the School of Distance Education.
It is almost incomprehensible for city folk to understand the sheer size and vastness of the Australian Outback., where the Flying Doctor is a part of the fabric of everyday life, where air travel is a lifeline and where schools have been run by distance learning for decades.
The bushies get on with life in isolation and take what help they can get and when they get it.
The School of the Air started with lessons posted to the kids and they would speak with their teacher over the radio – now, it is via the internet with satellite technology.
The Royal Flying Doctor Service, according to Wikipedia was as a result of the work of The Reverend John Flynn who had worked in rural and remote areas of Victoria and was commissioned by the Presbyterian Church to look at the needs of Outback people. His report to the Presbyterian Assembly in 1912 resulted in the establishment of the Australian Inland Mission (AIM), of which he was appointed Superintendent. In 1928, he formed the AIM Aerial Medical Service, a one-year experiment based in Cloncurry, Queensland. This experiment later became The Royal Flying Doctor Service.
My friend, many years ago, while working and training as a Nurse in the Outback, told me stories of the modern adaptation of Outback Communities to the isolation.
Driving an ambulance over bulldust to treat a patient who had been gored by a bull and hoping that they could keep him alive until the Flying Doctor could airlift him to safety.
She heard the story of the couple whose infant child was crying in the night. The generator had been turned off so there was no light save a torch. Struggling out of bed, torch in hand and finding their little one with an inland taipan ( a highly venomous snake ) in her crib and seeing her dying from multiple puncture wounds….
Or the guy who called the Flying Doctor because his mate had fallen off the back of a ute and was covered in blood, only to discover that the blood was a bottle of raspberry cordial that had broken.
With this auspicious date, the Anniversary of the birth of QANTAS, it has caused me to reflect on how much we have changed as a People.
We have become so weak and so dependent on Government Officials to tell us what to do and how to think that we have lost or are losing our resilience and our ability to look after ourselves.
QANTAS is, like every airline around the world, suffering due to plummeting revenue because someone released a virus that has been used as an excuse to bankrupt us, financially, physically, emotionally and mentally.
Children around the world are being forced to learn online with curriculums peppered with leftist indoctrination and unable to gain access to facts.
People are neglecting their healthcare because they are too frightened to go to a Doctor’s waiting room just in case they get the plague.
Chances are that the plague is no more than raspberry cordial dressed up to look like a massive bleed.
Our Governments are wanting to switch off coal and leave us in the dark, unable to see our child is in danger or that a snake has slithered into our lives and is lunging at us with toxic words and life threatening injuries to our freedom and sense of self.
Until we get visionaries back in to our present, people like Fysh and McGinness, Reverend Flynn and those who do not see obstacles, merely opportunities, we will never fly again.
Never soar to great heights of achievement or ever see the horizon of hope that our forebears saw and believed was possible.
QANTAS was born in the bush and will perish in a sea of socialist hype. As will the education system, the health system and free and elected Government.
The Flying Kangaroo, like the Bald Eagle, is being grounded and unless we get back to self reliance, resilience and , as the old saying goes “ to thine own self be true “ we will never recover.
I come back to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and his wings melted.
I hope President Trump has Teflon on his wings.
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