Hudson Fysh

The extraordinary life of the WWI hero who founded Qantas and gave Australia its wings

By Grantlee Kieza

Published by ABC Books
RRP $45.00 in hardcover | ISBN 9780733341533

Hudson Fysh remained at the controls of Qantas, the airline he founded alongside his friend Paul McGinness and first backer Winton grazier Fergus McMaster in 1922 in Western Queensland, until 1966.

He flew the first scheduled passenger flight from Longreach to Cloncurry in that year.

Anyone with a passing interest in the birth of aviation in Australia, and the history of Qantas in particular, will be fascinated by Grantlee Kieza’s lively and thoroughly researched portrait of the man who guided Australia’s national airline from its humble beginnings, through the dark days of the Great Depression, the perilous years of World War II into the early years of the great boom in international tourism.

What we take for granted with aviation today had its origins in the dreams of men who saw the future for aviation.

Hudson Fysh began life in Tasmania, a sickly boy traumatised by his parents’ broken marriage. Born in 1895, his father’s failure as a businessman would have been a sobering lesson to a boy raised by a mother from a wealthy family that had flourished through her father’s entrepreneurial abilities.

He was just nineteen at the outbreak of World War I. He went on to battle Germans in deadly dogfights in the skies over Palestine. It was on his return from the Great War that he launched his bush airline, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas).

Kieza has written a compelling account of Fysh’s life (supported by fascinating photographs from the archives). It is a life that deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated for its contribution to Australia.

FURTHER READING:

Tucked away on my bookshelves is a book published in 1950 (first published in 1933), Taming the North, by Hudson Fysh, published by the now defunct but once major Australian publisher Angus & Robertson.

The book is the story of Mr and Mrs Alexander Kennedy, pioneers of Western Queensland, but Hudson Fysh remarks that ‘during the years 1931 and 1932 …. Australia was in the throes of a depression, which even affected an up-and-coming business like aviation’ thus allowing him undisturbed nights and weekends to write the book.

I mention this book because it is very interesting for the context it provides to Fysh’s attempts to get QANTAS off the ground. It is a contemporary account from Fysh’s pen of the environment in which he launched QANTAS.

His views of Australia’s first people reflect the patriarchal approach of the time and would no doubt shock the sensibilities of readers today but I think it is important to understand the difficult times in which he struggled to get his airline off the ground. It is a credit to his vision that it would go on to become Australia’s national airline.

I paid only a few dollars for this book in a secondhand bookshop. I have to say good luck with finding a reasonably priced copy if you are keen to read it. State Libraries should have the book available.

As you would expect, it is mentioned in the bibliography of Grantlee Kieza’s book.

Verdict: Fascinating for the window it provides on the era in which Hudson Fysh dreamed of an airline that would tame the tyranny of distance.