Extraordinary airmen make aviation history

‘Then “Smithy” said to me … You're a hell of an organiser … I could talk for hours about Smithy. He was the big man as far as flying went’, Charles Ulm declared at a joyous civic reception.

‘Each indispensible’ ran the Evening News headline in June 1928, after Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, with their American crew, made the first successful trans-Pacific flight. With Australia’s aviation industry in its infancy in 1927, these two ambitious pilots had been trying to build commercial flight businesses. One day Ulm walked into Kingsford Smith’s office and proposed amalgamation. (Neither admitted to the other that they were broke.) Agreeing that a record-breaking flight could demonstrate the possibilities of aviation, the duo subsequently circumnavigated Australia in less than half the previous record time, before preparing for their extraordinary Pacific crossing. Painted after their deaths (in separate 1930s flying accidents), William Dargie’s portrait of the co-pilots captures their ebullience and confidence – in their dream and in each other.