Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Lainie Anderson, Wakefield Press, $29.95.
This is a true story of resourcefulness, revolutionary change, love and an almighty air race in 1919. The Long Flight Home details the 1919 Vickers Vimy flight from England to Australia.
Lainie Anderson’s book concerns the attempt by an air mechanic – Wally Shiers – to win a ‘Great Air Race’ on the way back from the end of World War I. In fact, he had promised to return home to his fiancée, Helena Alford.
However, he had not reckoned on charismatic fighter pilot Ross Smith, and an invitation to compete in the world’s most audacious air race. Smith is banking on an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy, a biplane with a fuselage that looks ominously like a coffin.
A £10,000 prize had been offered by Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes to the first air serviceman who managed to fly from England to Australia. Wally writes to Helena to say he won’t be home for another year.
An Australian war hero and pioneering flyer Sir Ross Macpherson Smith, along with his aviator brother Sir Keith Macpherson Smith, flew the first England-to-Australia route in November 1919. Joining them were Sergeant James Mallett (Jim) Bennett and Sergeant Walter (Wally) Shiers.
Who can resist a hero?
With a passion for preserving the story, Anderson has used war diaries, letters and Churchill Fellowship research from along the race route to recreate one of the most important – and largely forgotten – chapters in world aviation history.
Experts say that in its day the feat was as awe-inspiring as man landing on the moon.
In 2017, the journalist and writer travelled to nine countries on a Churchill Fellowship to gauge the significance of the pioneering 1919 flight from England to Australia and the Vickers Vimy aircraft now housed at Adelaide Airport.
Lainie’s ambitious and moving novel is told through her narrator, Wally Shiers. The tale spans the decades and crosses the globe, and at his journey’s end we’re left peering down from an open cockpit on two beacons of truth. There is no heroism without honour. There is no legacy without love.
Now you have the chance to learn how the incredible feat was achieved and the legacies of a flight that shrank the world.
Lainie is South Australia’s Epic Flight Centenary 2019 program ambassador.
