Survival, rescue and high politics in the Queensland wilds

It was not a hunch that made Bernard O’Reilly set off into the rainforest in the early afternoon of Saturday 27 February 1937, eight days after an Airlines of Australia Stinson aircraft went missing on a flight to Sydney from Brisbane’s Archerfield Aerodrome. A believer, he was comfortable with the possibility that he had been chosen for the mission. Having ‘spent most of his life in unwittingly fitting himself out for such a job’, O’Reilly thought it ‘quite natural’ to find inspired within him ‘the reasoning and initiative which would send that man out on his own accord’, a sign that there was ‘a clear purpose behind it all’.¹

O’Reilly did not believe such a thing as a hunch existed. The evidence eventually seemed clear enough, once he assembled it on the Friday after the plane’s disappearance. The official search had centred mainly around Newcastle and the Hawkesbury River, hundreds of miles south, where dozens of witnesses reported seeing and hearing the plane. At a time when aeroplanes were still unusual, a steamer off Barrenjoey Heads entered a sighting in its log. The postmaster at Davistown, on the Hawkesbury, reported he saw the Stinson pass overhead just after 5 pm—‘Knows the plane well and is certain of this’, declared the local police, who investigated and ‘Place every faith in this message’. Navigational tools were primitive, black box recorders were decades away, and investigators deduced the pilot had charted a course down the coast to avoid a dreadful storm inland and been lost at sea.