Charles Kingsford Smith

Sir Charles Edward Kingsford Smith, known as Smithy, was an Australian aviation pioneer born on 9 February 1897 in Brisbane. He grew up in Sydney, left school at 16 to become an engineering apprentice, and served in the Australian Army from 1915, first as a motorcycle despatch rider at Gallipoli. He later joined the Royal Flying Corps, earned his wings in 1917, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1917 after being shot down. After the war, he barnstormed in England and the United States before returning to Australia in 1921, where he became one of the country’s first commercial pilots with West Australian Airways.

In 1928, Kingsford Smith made the first transpacific flight, a three-leg journey from California to Brisbane via Hawaii and Fiji. With co-pilot Charles Ulm and crew members James Warner and Harry Lyon, he became a celebrity. That same year, he and Ulm completed the first non-stop flight across Australia, from Melbourne to Perth. The first non-stop flight from Australia to New Zealand was achieved in 1931 by Guy Menzies.

They founded Australian National Airways, but the airline and his other business ventures failed commercially. He kept flying in air races and attempting new feats. Kingsford Smith disappeared over the Andaman Sea in 1935 with co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge while trying to break the Australia–England speed record. He was celebrated as a national hero during the Great Depression and received many honours.

After his death, Sydney’s main airport was named for him, and he appeared on the Australian twenty-dollar note for decades. His parents were William Charles Smith and Catherine Mary Kingsford. He was registered at birth as Smith; the family later adopted the surname Kingsford Smith. They moved to Canada in 1903, returning to Sydney in 1907.

He attended school in Vancouver, then St Andrew’s Cathedral School and Sydney Technical High School, before apprenticing with the Colonial Sugar Refining Company at 16. In 1907, he nearly drowned at Bondi Beach but was rescued by lifeguards and revived by a nurse. He married Thelma Eileen Hope Corboy in 1923, divorcing in 1929, and married Mary Powell in December 1930. Shortly after his second marriage, he joined the New Guard, a radical monarchist, anti-communist, fascist-inspired organisation.