1933
A model of Nancy-Bird Walton’s Gipsy Moth aircraft
Flying doctors
Nancy-Bird Walton bought a de Havilland Leopard Moth in London for £1700. The full-size plane had a maximum speed of 137 mph (220 kph), with a range of 715 miles (1150 kilometres). This model of the plane was made by Mr Ernie Holden for Walton.
The first Australian woman licensed to fly was Millicent Bryant in 1927. Shortly afterwards, at the appropriately named town of Wingham in New South Wales, Nancy DeLow Bird took her first flight and never looked back.
‘At the air pageant,’ she recalled, ‘I went up for a flight, a ten shilling flight and then I gave a whole week’s wages two dollars – one pound – and asked the pilot if he’d do some aerobatics with me and he did some aerobatics and that became the ruling passion of my life. I then bought a book on flying. I studied and everybody laughed at me of course.’
In Wingham she met Charles Kingsford Smith, who invited her to come to Sydney and enrol in his flying school. She was accredited as a pilot quite quickly but had to wait until 1935 and her 19th birthday to get a commercial licence – the first Australian woman to do so.
With a Gipsy Moth, a gift from her parents, Bird set off to earn a living in the sky. She was a barnstormer and a courier and flew joy flights. Pilots of the time relied on Shell road maps for direction. Landing strips tended to be paddocks: if you were lucky, a local would drive a truck to stir up the dirt to indicate wind direction.
Bird’s first customer was Reverend Stanley Drummond of the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, for whom she flew nurses, mothers and children around the outback from her base in Bourke, in north-western New South Wales. The Gipsy Moth clapped out and in 1935 she upgraded to a Leopard Moth. After a year at Bourke, she found a new base 160 kilometrres away in Cunnamulla in southern Queensland and ran a charter and air-ambulance service.
Returning from the United Kingdom by boat in 1938, she met Charles Walton. Bird’s friend the Reverend John Flynn, who was known around Australia as the Flying Doctor, conducted their wedding.
John Flynn joined the Presbyterian ministry in 1903. In 1912 he became the first superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, a parish that encompassed 2 million square kilometres of outback. Flynn wanted to create ‘a mantle of safety’ for the outback. In 1928, he formed the AIM Aerial Medical Service, a one-year experiment based in Cloncurry, Queensland. In that first year of operations, the service flew approximately 32 000 kilometres in 50 flights, making it the first comprehensive air-ambulance service in the world.
From the mid-1920s, Flynn experimented with bush radios that might connect outback stations. His friend Alfred Traeger invented a reliable pedal radio that was perhaps the greatest boon to the outback: it enabled communication, education and a medical network that transformed life in remote Australia. Adelaide Miethke launched the School of the Air utilising the network that Flynn had connected.
The pastor was also known for his enlightened views about race. Aboriginal patients were always welcome in his hospitals, and he insisted that Indigenous Australians be encouraged with education and self-determination. He suggested that Australians who had been happy to contribute to the Belgians displaced by the German invasion of their country in 1914 should consider offering the same generosity to the people displaced by the European invasion of Australia in 1788.
Nancy Walton did a great deal of work with Flynn and the Flying Doctor service. Her work in the outback earned her an Order of Australia and the designation a Living National Treasure. Politically she campaigned for far right-wing causes although she was very strong on women not voting according to their husband’s preferences. After her marriage she gave up most professional work and retired the Leopard Moth. Qantas named their first A380 plane in her honour.