The Australian Flying Corps makes the first flight across Australia, 1919

When the famous Vickers Vimy of Ross and Keith Smith completed the first-ever flight from England to Australia in December 1919 it was greeted, albeit two days late, by a small, spindly-looking ex-World War I reconnaissance aircraft shown in this painting. The Be2e two-seater aircraft was flown by Capt. H.N. Wrigley DFC and Sgt A.W. Murphy DFC of the Australian Flying Corps.

Their arduous flight was the first crossing of the Australian continent. They took off from Point Cook near Melbourne to follow a tortuous route north to Darwin in the Northern Territory.

The briefing to the crew of the Be2e was to land at the various staging posts to assess them for future use as landing grounds. The route would then be used by the victorious Vickers Vimy to fly south on its trip via the eastern states to Melbourne where Ross Smith and his crew were to receive its £10,000 prize money for winning the Great Air Race from England to Australia.

But the survey was not just for the benefit of the Vimy; Darwin was seen as the natural entry point for any future international air route so the establishment of an internal airway linking the far north with the population centres of the eastern and southern states was therefore fundamental to its success.

The route followed by the Be2e had only recently been surveyed on the ground–P. J. McGinness and Hudson Fysh with George Gorham as their mechanic, drove and pushed a Ford car over the wild and inaccessible terrain from Charleville to Darwin, surveying potential landing grounds for the Vimy (and, of course, for airliners and mail planes of the future). Maj. R.S. Brown and Lt. A.R. McComb were responsible for the southern section.

The flying crews were soon to learn that aviating in the Australian outback was no pushover. When the Vimy came to fly the route, Ross Smith and his crew found it more demanding than the whole of their previous pioneering flight of 11,000 miles (17,700 km) across the world. They would have been very well aware of the hardship that Wrigley and Murphy had to undergo in flying the route the other way. The trip took Wrigley and Murphy 46 days for the 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres) and, because of the limited range of the Be2e, extra fuel tanks were fitted beneath the upper wings of the aircraft. Despite this, they had to make seventeen stops before arriving at Port Darwin.

Wrigley and Murphy received little public recognition for their pioneering efforts. However, among their peers who appreciated its true worth, there was recognition of their flight as being an epic tour-de-force. Even today, a flight of that nature would not be undertaken lightly by a small aeroplane carrying all the latest navigational aids, with fine airfields to provide good servicing and good runways to land on. In 1919, such sophistication was to be found in neither the aeroplane nor on the ground. Wrigley and Murphy’s flight was indeed a prodigious feat of airmanship.

Two of the ground survey teams became very well-known–P.J. McGinness and Hudson Fysh founded Qantas, an airline that became one of the principal users of the route they helped create. Arthur Murphy later became an RAAF pilot and Henry Wrigley, who was awarded an AFC and became a CBE, retired in 1946 as an Air Marshal in the RAAF.

Above: Capt. H.N. Wrigley DFC and Sgt A.W. Murphy DFC of the Australian Flying Corps