(This is the paper I prepared for the Aviation Cultures VI conference held on-line in July 2022.  It is a summary of the story told in my book, Western Airways.) (A PDF copy of the paper is available here)   This paper summarizes the results of research conducted into the creation of an aviation industry…

This is a book I wrote at the beginning of the 1990s about the organization of the RAAF during the Pacific War. The research was part funded by a Grant in Aid from the Australian War Memorial and a travel grant from Murdoch University. It has been floating around unpublished and finding no home since…

Circumstances these past few years have prevented me from publishing this third volume of my history of civil aviation in Australia in the Twentieth Century. As more delays are likely I’ve decided to make a text only version of the history available now. Time will tell if this history ever sees publication in another form.…

(A PDF copy is available here) Preface The following history was written by Jim Grant, a prolific researcher and writer of military, aviation and Western Australian history. He gave it to me as a text file many years ago and, so far as I have been able to determine, it has never been published. I…

(This article first appeared in the fourth issue of Logbook, c.1997.) (A PDF Copy is available here) Only two years before World War II started no RAAF aircraft of any kind were based in Western Australia, but there was an Air Force. Not until March 1938 did the Royal Australian Air Force become permanently based…

(This article was published in The Journal of Transport History, Vol 15 No 2, 1994, pp.165-78.)  (A PDF copy with endnotes is available here.)   On a day in early summer 1921 three Bristol Tourer aeroplanes droned north through Western Australian skies. They crossed the Murchison River about an hour’s flight north of Geraldton in…

(This item was published in Man and Aerial Machine 29, May-June 1992. It was taken from a draft of my PhD thesis.)  (A PDF copy with endnotes i available here.)  (A PDF copy with endnotes is available here.)   In 1921 Norman Brearley and a number of Western Australian business men and pastoralists established Western…

(I presented this paper at the Australian Historical Association’s conference at the University of Queensland in 1990 and it was later published in Continuum, Vol 7 No 3, 1993, pp.183-206.)  (A PDF copy with endnotes is available here.)   ‘Airmindedness’ is not a word found in every day speech. It may never have been common…