In November 1919, a year after the Great War, four Australian
servicemen made a unique and epoch-making journey home. In the open
cockpit of a twin-engine Vickers Vimy bi-plane, brothers Ross and
Keith Smith and mechanics Wally Shiers and Jim completed the
18,000-kilometre flight from Britain to Australia. The 28-day
journey, part of a competition sponsored by the Australian
government, made the Smith brothers internationally famous and
marked Australia's emergence into the air age. Ross Smith's fame
would be short-lived: he would be killed in an air accident less
than three years later on the eve of an attempt to make the first
ever circumnavigation of the world by air. Born on a South
Australian cattle station, Smith had a relatively privileged and
cosmopolitan upbringing. He was, nonetheless, working in a
warehouse in Adelaide in 1914, where he would have no doubt eked
out a quiet and unremarkable life were it not for the war's
outbreak. Enlisting in the light horse at 22 years of age, Smith
survived arduous campaigns at Gallipoli and in the Sinai Desert
before volunteering for the Australian Flying Corps. Smith's feats
in the skies above Palestine during 1917-18 earned him a reputation
as one of the great fighter pilots of the war. By the armistice he
had received the Military Cross twice and the Distinguished Flying
Cross three times; he was one of only three British Empire airmen
to do so during the war. Smith's skill in the cockpit also saw him
assigned the Middle East theatre's only twin-engine bomber during
the war's final year, a machine he used to support T. E. Lawrence
'of Arabia's' campaign against the Turks in Jordan and, after the
war, survey an air-route between Cairo and Calcutta. Anzac and
Aviator is the story of this extraordinary Australian and the
fascinating era in which he lived, one in which aviation emerged
with bewildering speed to comprehensively transform both warfare
and transportation. Born a decade before powered flight and going
off to war on horseback, Smith finished the conflict in command of
a bomber, the weapon that would come to symbolise the totality of
warfare in the twentieth century.
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