Waypoints, p.1
Waypoints, page 1
WAYPOINTS
Adam Ouston
ThisIsSplice.co.uk
Adam Ouston is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and the recipient of the 2014 Erica Bell Literary Award as well as the manuscript prize at the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2017. He holds a PhD and has worked as a copywriter, editor and bookseller. As a musician he performs as Costume. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.
For Emily.
These new dimensions are Up.
— FM-2030
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue...
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
It’s bizarre because now, in our age of information, when any fact, datum or titbit is literally at our fingertips, and the price for being deemed wrong grows mightier by the day; when any idle curiosity or bagatelle can be satisfied in an instant, invariably leading to further idle curiosities and bagatelles, taking you deeper into the goldmine of a seemingly limitless supply; when it’s more or less understandable that, for most of us, there really is no excuse for not knowing anything, it’s all there, all you have to do is look it up; now, in an age when the sweep of history is laid out before us, notwithstanding all the caveats, hesitations and conflicting perspectives, of those who know about the airborne exploits of the Great Harry Houdini—illusionist, self-promoter, dispeller of frauds and inveterate daredevil—more people seem to know that the Master of Mystery didn’t actually get the record for the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft in Australia than know who in fact did. The suggestion that the Handcuff King had been beaten to the punch came as a surprise to me, but the more I looked into the matter, the more I found that the record held by the cunning escapologist had become disputed, qualified and sometimes even dismissed outright, given all the fuss over aviation at the dawn of human flight, records being attempted and broken, new heights being reached, both literally and metaphorically—really, the world at the time was so taken by all things aircraft-related that many newspapers had sections headed ‘Flight’ to discuss of global air events; who went up where and in what, which awards were on offer and with what prize money—indeed, there was so much wonder surrounding aviation, and people were so awestruck at seeing their fellow humans take to the skies, and the hype was so intense, that it is conceivable that official records do not quite match the events as they really transpired; which is why there is some conjecture from certain quarters surrounding Houdini’s attempt to soar over Australian soil, the curious upshot being that while it might be common knowledge that the great mystifier held the record (or holds it still, depending on who you ask) the very fact that it is disputed seems to be the fact worth knowing, maybe because it implies greater familiarity with the subject, which in turn suggests that the more valuable fact regarding Houdini’s flight on 18 March 1910 at Diggers Rest in Victoria, just north of Melbourne, coincidentally near the present-day Tullamarine Airport, isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t. “That’s the spot,” people say, “that’s the very paddock where Harry Houdini—born Erik Weisz, of course, in Hungary in 1874, one of seven children, the youngest of whom, Carrie, was left almost completely blind following a childhood accident, though both the accident and whatever came of her (some say she lived her life as a ghostwriter) is an even deeper mystery than the aura surrounding her elder brother with the mesmerising eyes—that’s the precise location, look it up, that’s where Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in landlocked Hungary in 1874 only to travel to America four years later, with his family, including Carrie, and who, five years after that, at the age of nine, giving his first public performance as a trapeze artist, crowned himself ‘The Prince of the Air’—how fitting that moniker would become some twenty-seven years down the track when he arrived at Diggers Rest, north of Melbourne, near today’s Tullamarine, where if you go up there now you can pinpoint the selfsame paddock in which Harry Houdini (there’s a memorial; two, actually), who also went by Erik Weisz, Ehrich Weiss and Harry Weiss, not to mention Prince of the Air—why not King of the Air we’ll never know—if you hop on a train or a bus or rent a car, you can zero in on the coordinates where the Great Houdini—all the way from Europe via America via Europe where, incidentally, he picked up the French-made aircraft, a Voisin biplane, which he’d flown in Hamburg before sailing off, plane in cargo, for the Great Southern Land aboard the P&O liner SS Malwa, his wife Bess was by now drinking heavily and out of reach, while at thirty-six the great mystifier and demystifier (he maintained it was all just trickery and sleight of hand, not magic at all) was starting to feel that vaudeville had had its day, and that maybe he himself, the Great H.H., had also had his day, with perpetually sore wrists from escaping handcuffs, aching shoulders from daily dislocations, a ruined lower back that would only get worse as the years went by, and a tender derrière from having an infected boil lanced barely a month prior; which is to say that as he stood on the blustery deck, hands in pockets, gazing out over the endless silver sea—with Bess sleeping it off in their cabin—his mind was turning more and more to thoughts of death: his own, yes, but also the death of vaudeville, the extinction of a craft he’d spent his life honing, the silencing of the crowds, and the end of wonders—which was strange in itself because he would have been the first to admit that death had been, from the very beginning, his constant companion, one he’d actively courted and flirted with, for it was the threat of his imminent demise that kept derrières on seats—but now aboard the Malwa, the wind making his receding hair seem possessed, he was contemplating the end of all that, the death of death, the threat of choking, drowning, suffocating suddenly humdrum, faced with the dark maws of a yawning audience, he might have even considered flinging himself seaward if it were not for these fantastic new flying machines that promised to give a lift to his stalling career, his stalling life. Germany had been a practice run, and while he skimmed beneath those monochrome Teutonic skies, he imagined himself soaring over the sun-soaked paddock and disinterested livestock half-an-hour north of Melbourne, picturing the khaki scrub blurred by speed and the black dots of skyward-gazing spectators, the throng of enthusiasts cheering him on—he could hear them cheering, just like they’d done in theatres from Boston to Belfast—the men waving their bowler hats up at him or else at God, who could tell the difference?—why not God of the Air we’ll never know—because that’s what it would have felt like being up there, a god, a pioneer!, when the rest of the world had been discovered, when every continent, country and capital city had been canvassed and coined, when there was practically not a blade of grass that had not bent under an explorer’s boot, here he was, the Great Harry Houdini, Prince of the Air, up among clouds, the final frontier, another death-defying feat (you always had to stay one ahead of your rivals), a new and untapped way to die, a sudden shot in the arm for the listless Handcuff King and his expectant audience; surely he must have felt like a god among children with the power of lightning in his veins, he could imagine it up above Hamburg, could see it on the insides of his eyelids, and you can too, if you go there to the veritable, the verifiable, dot on the map, north of Melbourne, that waypoint of waypoints, and look up and exclaim that right there, that’s the very spot where Houdini—though he often went by other names; I prefer Erik Weisz with that particular and peculiar and very Hungarian ‘z,’ as did his beloved mother Cecília—where, at last, Houdini did not become the first man to conduct a controlled flight over Australian soil.” It’s bizarre because, in this day and age, in which everything is available to us, every fact, datum and tidbit, and there’s no excuse for not knowing anything, it’s all there for you, you don’t even have to spell it correctly, in fact you don’t have to spell it at all, you can just mutter a question into the æther and the æther itself will answer, which is perhaps the greatest trick in the history of magic, speak to the air and the air speaks back—ask not now who are the Gods of the Air!—shout into the darkness and the darkness shouts back, because that’s all we really want, isn’t it, to be able to commune with the unseen, the intangible, the incorporeal and seemingly not there, to have those to whom you’re calling out call back, for them to be ready with answers to all of your questions; in this day and age all the facts just hang there ripe for the plucking, you barely even have to reach out, and yet it’s positively bizarre that the fact that Houdini was not the pioneer of the Aussie skies takes precedence over the other and related fact, the fact implied by the insertion of that devilish word “not,” that he was beaten to the punch by someone else—and yet, strangely, it is this first fact that holds more weight than the second, than the one vis à vis, regarding, pertaining to who exactly did achieve this feat. Apparently it’s more crucial to hang on to that miniscule but very weighty “not,” that spanner in the works, that devil’s trident of three letters, one, two, three, N O T: apparently it’s better to know an enigmatic negation of a thing that never was, or that maybe was, or that was depending upon who you believed, or who paid the most money—ah, money—because you might also know that Erik Weisz, Ehrich Weiss, Harry Weiss, Harry Houdini was brought out to Australia at enormous expense by another Harry, one Harry Rickards, born Henry Benjamin Leete in England in 1843 before he left for Australia in 1871 to become a famous comedian, baritone and maestro of the stage who at one point owned and managed nearly every significant theatre, playhouse and opera hall in Australia, and was known as perhaps the most significant promoter, manager and proprietor in the world, the likes of which had never been seen, and who lured a host of distinguished performers from all over the globe to stages all over the Great Southern Land, not t he least of whom was Houdini, Weiss, Weisz, who commanded a princely “Of the Skies” sum so exorbitant that Harry Rickards, Henry Benjamin, even noted it on the theatrical posters he printed to announce the series of flights Houdini would make in Sydney five weeks after his record-setting (depending who you asked) feat at Diggers Rest:
And so the cost of getting the Hungarian-American to Australia became one of Harry Rickards’ selling points, a trick still played by promoters and publicists the world over when they pay through the nose for something just so they can say they paid through the nose for it, because if someone knows you’ve paid through the nose, if they get the whiff of something big in the offing, you’ll immediately pique their interest, which, with all the incredible noise buzzing around in everyone’s ears these days, is usually a fool’s errand, because how often does it occur that when one mouths into the void the void mouths back?, never!, not in my bitter experience anyway, but the ever-astute Harry, Henry, comedian and baritone and vaudeville promoter extraordinaire, knew the true value of the phrase “At Enormous Expense,” which he put right at the top of his publicity material so that everyone knew the gravity of the situation, so that everyone got a sniff of the bigtime, this Harry Houdini was indeed an important visitor (as if they didn’t already know, but “At Enormous Expense” no doubt sweetened the deal), in hope of setting tongues wagging, which undoubtedly had the desired effect—old Henry Benjamin knew how to gee-up a crowd—because nowadays it is indeed much more valuable, in an age when knowledge is not power so much as a license to speak, in fact it’s not really even knowledge, to know that Harry Houdini, Erik Weisz, was not, did not, could not and now is not, than it is to know who in fact was, did, could and is. Because what matters, what carries the most caché—an invaluable commodity acquired often at enormous expense—is not what Harry Houdini did or did not do; is not that he was first, second, third or fourth; nor is it even what he was attempting to do—because isn’t it true that many failures are indeed just as famous as successes, as it is in this case—nor is it even the fact of his defying gravity, because by the time he did it gravity had been defied already in every important corner of the world—indeed, he’d just done it himself in Hamburg (albeit to varying degrees of success, one of which included a significant crash)—but what really matters is the fact, and it is a fact, as verifiable as any other, that it was Harry Houdini, Erik Weisz, Ehrich Weiss, Harry Weiss, who did or did not do it. “Did you know,” we can now say, “that on 18 March 1910, Harry Houdini, the man with the mesmerising eyes, the Hungarian-American who on arriving Stateside dropped the ‘z’ from his native surname—all the better to fit in or stand out—came all the way to Australia, at enormous expense to Harry Rickards, born Henry Benjamin Leete in Stratford, London, who, upon his death a year later in 1911, was survived by his second wife, Kattie, Kate, Roscow, Rickards, Leete, the Australian trapeze artist and theatre actor who also, in her younger years, performed as Katie Angel and was described as “the most beautiful trapeze performer in the world” as well as “the greatest wonder of the age!”—and is it any wonder, for high-flying acts never fail to strike awe into the audience’s collective heart, their silver and white suits reflecting the searchlight as they soar overhead in defiance of gravity, in defiance of death and affirmation of life, arms outstretched, muscles taut, and if you look closely, if you have eagle vision, you’ll see the blissful smile and sleepy eyes of the performer in a trance-like state as they enter the world of flight, as they cross a threshold and become, even if just for a second, superhuman, mystical, otherworldly; as they open a door to this other world so that we might poke our heads in and catch a glimpse of what lies beyond, a flash of the unbelievable, a flicker of the unimaginable, a flame of the seemingly unknowable lighting up the darkness, which is enough to throw open the door in one’s own heart; I should know, it happened to me some dozen or so years ago when I first saw the woman who would become my wife, Alison, in a silver and red trapeze suit, flying through the air a dozen or so metres above me, cutting across the blue, red and yellow backdrop of the bigtop, colours swirling by, a kaleidoscopic image, and with the wisdom of second sight I knew that I would spend the rest of my life with her, that she would join my family’s circus and we’d travel the world together and never be apart, living, working and playing together: a moment of clairvoyance that has proven both true and not true. No doubt it was a similar feeling to the one that came over the inveterate baritone, promotor and vaudeville proprietor Henry, Harry, Leete, Rickards when he first laid eyes on his Katie Angel wheeling, drifting and skyrocketing like a firework above him—yes, Kate Rickards, who would in 1921, long after the death of her husband, herself die of heatstroke while sailing back to Australia from England, in fact while crossing the Red Sea, and be given a sea burial, not before, of course, having mothered four children, three of whom had predeceased her, though the sole survivor, her daughter Madge Adelaide, only outlived her by some seven years, and had also been a singer and comedic actor in her youth, no doubt toeing the family line and indeed marrying another actor, a certain Frank Harwood (real name Joseph Gibbs) with whom she had a son, Harry Frank Broadbent, born Harry Frank Gibbs, who in turn duly changed his name when his mother divorced Joseph and married one John Allen Broadbent—although after the remarriage Madge Adelaide’s son now preferred the handle Jim Broadbent—and who would also go on to become an aircraft pilot of some repute, entering countless air races and attempting to break many records, not the least of which was the England-to-Australia record—which he did, landing in Darwin after five days, four hours, twenty-one minutes—only to be lost at sea, like his dear old mum, like so many sons and mothers, wives and daughters, some thirty-six years after Madge, on 29 September 1958, when he disappeared in his aircraft, a Martin PBM Mariner, somewhere over the Atlantic approximately one hundred and fifty miles southwest of Lisbon, Portugal, along with his co-pilot, Thomas Rowell, four crew and thirty passengers—this poor Harry Gibbs, Jim Broadbent, was doubtless named after his pioneering grandfather Harry Rickards, Henry Benjamin Leete, who at enormous expense (£200 per week: the most any artist had been paid in Australia) brought another Harry, Houdini, Weiss, Weisz, to Australia in 1910 with the purpose of conducting the first ever controlled flight in Australian airspace, over an airfield, or rather a paddock (there were no airfields in those days—nobody knew what an airfield was!), a patch of dirt known as the old Plumpton paddock, at Diggers Rest, north of Melbourne, curiously close to today’s Tullamarine Airport—must be something in the air out there—only for Houdini to be beaten to the punch and thus not become the first man to conduct a controlled flight in Australian airspace.” Which is to say that it’s more important, ie. carries more caché and is therefore a fact worth knowing, and not only knowing but repeating whenever and wherever one can, to know who, at the end of the day, it was that, at enormous expense to one Harry, Henry, Rickards, Leete, in fact did not conduct the first controlled flight in Australian airspace at Diggers Rest—which, incidentally, was founded along the road to the goldfields of Bendigo as a spot where the gold diggers could, you guessed it, rest—than it is to know who indeed was the first person to achieve this remarkable and hotly contested—though it was barely a contest, for Harry Rickards, who knew how to gee-up a crowd, had made sure that his publicity material spoke loud enough to put all other comers in the shade—feat. It’s bizarre that the attempt, for it can never be labelled anything other than an attempt, because although Houdini did indeed, at 8.00am on that Friday morning in March, after a couple of initial attempts—attempts at the attempt—were thwarted by unfavourable winds, manage at last to achieve lift-off and forward thrust, thus circling round the paddock for something close to a minute and, for the moment, clinching the trophy ahead of rival aviator and competitor Ralph Coningsby Banks, who’d been trying to beat the escapologist to the punch, having camped out at Diggers Rest in the weeks leading up to 18 March and had, in fact, made an attempt on 1 March in his Wright Model A Flyer only to travel around three hundred metres at a height of less than five metres before a sudden gust pitched him into the turf, creating an incredible impact that threw poor Banks clear and also wrecked his Flyer which then took weeks to repair, as did his confidence—his flight was not deemed eligible due to the fact, and it was a fact because the authorities saw it with their own eyes, that at no point in his three hundred metres was Banks ever in control of the Flyer—so that come the morning of 18 March, although his aircraft was almost repaired, his belief that he might beat the great escapologist to the title would never materialise, all he could do was stand and watch (and, incidentally and no doubt painfully—perhaps more so than the crash itself—be one of nine people to sign a witness statement attesting to the fact of Houdini’s successful controlled flight) as the man with the mesmerising eyes, born Erik Weisz, the great entertainer who was there on a £200-a-week retainer—he didn’t need it, but it was important to advertise that he was getting it—swooped in and snaffled the trophy, awarded by the newly formed Aerial League of Australia, recognising that his was the country’s first controlled flight in a powered aircraft, when actually it was only an attempt, and this attempt, belated at that, would see him go down in the record books as not the first to have achieved the feat, but rather the second, and thus begs the question could it even be called an attempt, for a belated attempt to be the first at something could arguably be seen as simply wasting one’s time, not to mention that of the nine witnesses, including the damaged and severely depressed Ralph Coningsby Banks, reporters, photographers (Houdini was ever the publicity hound) and, of course, a wickedly grinning, palm-rubbing Harry Rickards. In fact, it was likely that Rickards, Leete, the comic baritone and great proprietor of theatrical extravaganzas, who was at the pinnacle of his career as the most renowned vaudeville promoter in the world, some eighteen months before his sudden death in October 1911, had squashed all tell of the other first flight—promoters are prone to such deceptions—in order to drum up more publicity for Houdini’s Australian tour, for both Harrys, Houdini and Rickards, knew not only how to work a crowd but also how to work the media, and being able to tell the newspapers that they would be able to tell their readers about the first ever controlled flight in Australian airspace guaranteed both newspaper sales and ticket sales, and indeed Rickards even made sure it was right there on the poster: THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL AVIATOR IN AUSTRALIA. So it’s weird that the bankable fact that has come down through the ages, or rather the decades, over a century later, when getting on a plane costs much less than £200 and the only time aircraft appear in the media is when they are not in the sky—as I now know only too well—is not the same fact that was so bankable in 1910, is not that Harry Houdini was first, but that Harry Houdini was not first, a fact that seems more valuable now than its opposite was over one hundred years ago, and was why I, Arthur Bernard Cripp—though I go by Bernard because my father has already snaffled Arthur—have sought to recreate this particular controlled flight as opposed to the actual first flight, for not only did it capture my imagination arguably as much as it captured the imaginations of all and sundry in 1910, but there was also, as you’ll see, a gravitas to Houdini’s flight, the record, the facts, have all been held aloft by mere hot air, conjecture, hearsay and legend, which is to say that what I sought was to recreate not so much the flight itself, the mechanics of getting that old bird off the deck, but the idea of the flight, the hope of it, the ghostliness of it; and I guess that’s also at heart why I am now writing it down, committing it to the page, once and for all, in no uncertain terms, in an attempt—let’s call this an attempt as well—in an attempt to latch onto the idea, the concept “flight,” to disappear into it, no, to embody it like the trapeze artist, in short to become flight; also to untangle everything, to make sense of it, to shout into the æther and have the æther shout back, to ask the question and receive the answer, the answer being the fate and whereabouts of my wife, Alison, and daughter, Beatrice, who—while I remained at home to run the family business now that Dad, Arthur, is increasingly incapacitated, on oxygen and in the grip of dementia—disappeared in an airplane (like the only son of Madge Adelaide, grandson of Harry Rickards, Harry Frank ‘Jim’ Broadbent), vanished without a trace, along with two hundred and thirty-seven other people, somewhere over Asia—possibly somewhere over Asia, no-one knows for sure—some six-and-a-half years ago, and some six years before I made my own attempt, my attempt at flight, out at Diggers Rest in a reconstructed Voisin biplane, one hundred and ten years after Houdini, according to sources at the time, especially that proprietor extraordinaire, that Peddler of Posters, Prince of Fliers, Harry Rickards, became THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL AVIATOR IN AUSTRALIA. Perhaps, I thought, when the idea for the project suddenly presented itself, as such ideas do—projects and wisdom, if ever they are to come, only ever come suddenly—perhaps I might understand something better, I might solve something, the riddle of the disappearance of my wife and child, the riddle of flight, the riddle of disappearances full stop, because as soon as the project suddenly, like wisdom, presented itself, the idea of parroting the Prince of the Air, the idea of reconstructing and recreating, in the most minute, subtle details, the most fiddly facts, for it is in the details where the truth always, without fail or exception, lies—one hundred and ten years later, it felt just possible that if I could shout into the æther the æther would, despite the fact that it almost never does, shout back; if I could go up in that rickety machine, defying the gravity of a century past—and we all know that gravity was far more insistent back then—even if just for a minute and covering barely three hundred metres, with nine people bearing witness, including a photographer and a journalist—like me, they would only be permitted to use the same equipment as their original pair, ie. a pad and pencil and a Kodak Brownie No. 2—I might have been able to find them up there, Alison and Beatrice, somewhere among the clouds, might have been able to call forth, conjure up, transport, a history now lost and in so doing perform a kind of time travel; which is to say that although I’d be going up in that antiquated, prehistoric, falling-apart contraption, I might also be going up in a kind of time machine, which in turn would mean that although the Prince of the Air, the Great Harry, Ehrich, Houdini, Weisz, was not the first person to successfully conduct a controlled flight in Australia, he just might have been the first person to conduct a controlled flight by a powered time machine in Australia; or maybe once again, despite his fame and fortune, despite his notoriety and acumen with the press, despite being backed by Harry Rickards—that is, having access to Harry’s exceptionally deep pockets and vast networks—despite everything both Harrys managed to get into the newspapers and onto the wireless, the Hungarian-American with the mesmerising eyes would once again come in second, because it would be only due to my actions, the actions of one Arthur Bernard Cripp, the fact of my recreation of Houdini’s renowned though hardly record-breaking flight, that his French-made Voisin biplane would only now, in the twenty-first century, turn into a time machine, which would, sorry to say, dear Harrys, render me—Bernard to those who know me—the first man to travel back in time and beat the Great Houdini to the punch despite his having taken off from that paddock at Diggers Rest, half-an-hour north of Melbourne, one hundred and ten years prior. And so he would be second again, only by a whisker, but a whisker nonetheless, because while it was obvious that it would be me, Bernard, flying into the foreign land of the past, which was unbelievably closer than you might think, barely thirty metres over our heads, back to when journalists used a pencil and paper and photographers a Kodak Brownie No. 2, back to when witnesses to significant events signed statements of fact to prove that it all went down, if you’ll excuse the pun, before the age of mass communication and instant messaging and shaky private videos of inhuman acts made public, posted for all the world to see, before the time, now, when every moment of every day is recorded, every statement, every slip, every trip to the shops, all logged and saved and cached and timestamped, before our time in which everything is evidence, in which we know and access everything, everywhere around the world, and a time before jumbo jets and their disappearances; while it’s true to say that after building the Voisin and carting it up to Diggers Rest and taking to the skies, it would be me, Bernard Cripp, flinging myself into the past, it’s also true to say that it would be the great Hungarian-American Ehrich Weiss, Harry Houdini, flinging himself forward into this, our, day and age, the third millennium, a time when we can barely be bothered filming the movements of aircraft at all, unless you have serious mental problems, because they have become—as everything does eventually, even grief—routine, dull, mundane, everyday, completely unremarkable. Which is bizarre, because now, in this pocket of time just waiting for the great escapologist to come zinging in scarf flapping, it is more or less—and more more than less—the unremarkable that is, in fact, recorded, filmed, saved, posted, archived and cached—meals, walks, dogs, cats, cleaning, driving, flowers, views, statues, clouds—while the miracle of flight, the absolute improbability, the impossibility, of something as heavy as, say, a three hundred-tonne Boeing 777-200ER ever getting off the ground let alone soaring at thirty thousand feet at almost 1000kph, is barely given the time of day and now comes in a very distant second to meals, walks, dogs, cats, cleaning, driving, flowers, views, statues, clouds; everything’s upside-down, because we should be completely mesmerised by the fact—and it is a fact—of such an enormous contraption, the size of an office building, being able to lumber down a runway and hoick itself into the air with almost two hundred and forty souls onboard jetting off for the far corners of the globe. It’s bizarre, even tragic, that the remarkable has become, in an age in which we’re best equipped to share in it, unremarkable, in which the miraculous, three hundred tonnes at thirty thousand feet—imagine telling old Henry Leete!—has become so humdrum that we don’t even bother monitoring every single second of every single instance of flight when truly we should be completely mesmerised; so humdrum that we don’t sit around oohing and ahhing all day long like we did for the Moon Landing, as we should, watching out for absolutely every detail of it, as we could—why are we doing anything else?!—because the surveillance technology is most definitely there and would allow us to never miss a thing, not one moment, so we would have all the facts, nothing would be left to guesswork or imagination or likely or unlikely theories or suppositions and we could all say, “Ah, well that makes sense!” now that everything would be grounded in cold, hard fact. As I sit here writing this, I cannot believe my own eyes; cannot believe that I am not, this very minute, outside looking skyward—it’s a beautiful clear winter’s day, the air is fresh and even the sounds of the neighbourhood, power tools, barking dogs, passing cars, all seem so crisp and new—there’s a flightpath on the northern horizon so I can see, every now and then, blinking lights by night or a glaring fuselage by day and really it’s just astounding that I’m not online tracking every single flight in progress right this very second all around the world, shaking my head in disbelief and yet comforted by the facts, the coordinates, the waypoints, the messages transmitted through state-of-the-art fly-by-wire technology backwards and forwards to air traffic control—it is worth noting also that not ten days after Houdini’s flight at Diggers Rest, George Taylor, who presented the great escapologist with a trophy from the newly formed Aerial League of Australia, transmitted the nation’s very first military wireless signal on behalf of the Wireless Institute of Australia (founded one week before Harry H.’s flight, 11 March 1910)—those Kings of the Sky, whose eyes are, like a spider’s, supposedly everywhere all the time, like the government’s, so they tell us, there’s no privacy anymore, the authorities know everything about us all, they have the facts about your age, date of birth, income, internet searches, habits, etc., they can compile dossiers on anyone they like, watertight character profiles, which enable them finally to lean back in their office chairs, clasp their hands over swelling junk-fed stomachs, and say, “Ah, well that makes sense!” Miraculous that I am not outside looking skyward like those nine spectators, including a journalist and photographer for The Argus, on that brisk morning of 18 March 1910, when King Edward VII, the “Uncle of Europe,” was on the throne, though he wouldn’t be much longer; less than two months remained of his life, which expired on 6 May, while he was in the company of his son, the Prince of Wales—soon to be King George V—who quietly told him that, that very afternoon, the king’s horse, Witch of the Air, had won at Kempton Park, to which Edward, uttering his final words, said, eyes closed: “Yes, I have heard of it. I am very glad.” What comfort the king must have taken in those facts, passed on to him by his heir apparent; you can hear it in his voice, which would have been gravelly if not outright ghostly on account of his having smoked at least twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars per day for most of his life and, throughout the preceding years, having suffered terribly from acute bronchitis, and so his last words, as Witch of the Air won and the King of England lost, would have been a very wheezy indeed “I am very glad,” belying a comfort despite all his discomforts, the comfort no doubt of his greatest hope and son, the Prince of Wales, being by his side, but also the knowledge that his greatest hope of the racetrack had come home first, as though the king’s soul had already left his body and entered his horse’s, metempsychosis they call it, filling his filly with all the might, bravado, confidence and majesty of the royal bloodline, the spirit of the age, thrusting her down the final straight amid a storm of applause and flashbulbs, under the gaze of hundreds and thousands of spectators craning their necks to bear witness to the final detail about this world that their monarch would ever hear, the last word fit for a king, “Your horse has come in,” a manly king at that, twenty fags and twelve cigars a day, words that would give comfort and closure and a sense of life well-lived. Why do we not today watch the skies like those people watched Witch of the Air, sister to the three-year-old Vain Air, that day at Kempton Park in 1910, when the spectators, aware of the dire nature of their king’s health, were unsure whether to cheer as they normally did when the monarch’s horse came in first or otherwise remain silent out of solemn respect, and so emitted a sort of low foghorn blast of awe and wonder, both at the miracle of the win in the Sport of Kings against the loss of their king and the inner turmoil whipped up by these two conflicting events—it’s such a bizarre, incredibly dazzling sensation feeling opposing emotions of equal force simultaneously—while arms were thrown around shoulders, ladies kissed gentlemen on their cheeks, all and sundry waved their hats, and yet the eyes were uncertain when looking over the grandstand as they did for confirmation of how they should best react, looking down as though already at the state funeral, looking up as though they might catch something high above? Why, when something can weigh three hundred tonnes and still rise thirty thousand feet into the air, why do we not stand there struck by the miraculous nature of the phenomenon, with awe and wonder, rendered mute by the joy of watching the impossible and at the same time by the fear the impossible arouses in us, something the philosopher Edmund Burke would have termed “awesome” long before the word entered the mouths of surfers and skateboarders; struck by the awesomeness of flight and noting down every single feature and facet of it, every fact, afraid to look, afraid to turn away? By recreating in detail, by scrounging up every feature and facet of that misbegotten flight of 8.00am on 18 March 1910, a Friday, a flight conducted by Harry Houdini, Ehrich Weiss, at great expense to Harry Rickards, Henry Leete, at Diggers Rest, north of Melbourne, in a French-designed Voisin biplane, with nine witnesses below, including a journalist and photographer, with King Edward VII on the throne—or, rather, in his sickbed—I, Arthur Bernard Cripp, Bernard to those who know me, would speak to the air and return to that age of awe, when there was still a sense of the impossible, when things occurred for the first time and not as a matter of routine, an age of wonder and consolation for life’s crushing realities—because, really, our only consolation today is that there are crushing realities everywhere we look, we are not alone in our despair, in every direction, in every land, in every household, and so we’re doubly crushed beneath the avalanche of crushing realities—when there was a sense of hope for what progress the future would bring and the world marvelled at what was possible, even though it all seemed completely impossible, which was what made it so marvellous, so mesmerising, that a man, albeit the Great Harry Houdini, at enormous expense, had sailed the great distance from Europe to Australia to conduct the nation’s first ever controlled flight in a powered aircraft—an attempt that might not have been an attempt at all because it was belated and because the primary, essential and unequivocally paramount point of attempting to be the first is to ensure that no-one has beaten you to the punch—and that this man could, can you believe it?, fly himself up, up, up high above a paddock at Diggers Rest, completing a full circle and staying airborne for almost a full minute—how different everything looked up there, the vast flatness of this country, as far as the eye could see in all directions, a place of gigantic if colourless horizons, no wonder they’d had so much trouble with the unceasing winds, but also how peaceful it was to be away from everything down there, to be decoupled from that earthly existence, an existence that had become, for the Handcuff King, uncertain—before he landed safely on terra firma to cheers and applause from the nine spectators who ran up to him afterwards wanting to shake the hand not only of the Great Houdini but also the first (actually the second) man to conduct a controlled flight in a powered aircraft in Australia. All of which, of course, was more easily said than done; for, being as I was trained in fire performance, as a performer in my father’s empire, Cripp’s Circus—now solely mine—I still had no experience in flying apart from what I knew about trapeze, which I’d picked up from watching the ever-miraculous flights of my wife Alison, and therefore I needed to learn not only how to fly but also how to operate the vastly antiquated Voisin biplane, of which only sixty had ever been built, and which, although it became the second ever flying machine to conduct a successful controlled flight anywhere in Australia, had in fact been the first in the world to do so in a feat accomplished by a certain Henri (though sometimes Henry) Farman, the French aviator, when he held his Voisin aloft after taking off at Issy-les-Moulineaux on 10 November 1907 and completing a full circle overhead for a total of one minute and fourteen seconds, for which he received the Deutsch-Archdeacon Cup, and rightly so, since the Voisin biplane was less an airplane as we’ve come to know such craft and more like a winged bicycle upon which one sat as though actually riding a bicycle—its boxkite wings and skeleton providing next to zero protection for the pilot—which was why, at 5:14pm on 17 September 1908, in an aircraft somewhat similar to the Voisin, the American pilot Thomas Selfridge became the world’s first aircrash fatality, when his Wright Flyer pitched nose-first into the Virginian soil at Fort Myer and threw him headlong into the wooden uprights of the framework whereupon he smashed his skull—and therefore was it any wonder they awarded Henri, Henry, Farman that trophy for going up like that, because to do so in those days was madness, sheer madness, or at least vigorously demonstrating what Freud would not all that much later term the “death drive” in 1920, a principle that was, curiously, first put forth in 1912 by one Sabina Spielrein in her paper ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being.’ So in making my preparations to recreate Houdini’s flight, my attempt at his attempt at an attempt at a flight of record, it was imperative I learned the ropes and took my time—I’m usually a very impatient person, which is probably why I am and have always been so attracted to the fire performance to which I have devoted most of my life so far, the intensity of it all, the breathing, spitting, swallowing fire, or dancing with it, of holding it aloft and spinning it in the air, of walking through it, of setting myself ablaze; it is instantaneous, the heat the rush the spectacle, and the rewards are almost as unfathomable as the costs—and so after making several enquiries to local aviation clubs and the National Aviation Museum, as well as scrolling through the flaming comments sections of several relevant articles posted by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences—an experience one should have, but only once—I managed to track down a certain Francis ‘Frank’ or ‘Southy’ Southermore, a retired Englishman who’d spent his life working for National Rail between various hospitalisations owing to a weakened immune system and periods of alcoholism, and who with his wife Janice had relocated to Australia on doctor’s orders that he take a long-earned rest in a warmer climate with more than a week of sunshine every year. Southy walked with a limp on account of a prosthetic leg below the knee, which meant he had a gait like a lurching top-heavy ship despite the fact that his false leg was of equal length to its biological other and had been fitted in England before his emigration by a doctor under the employ of the National Rail because not only was Francis Frank Southy (pronounced, of course, Suthy; rhymes with sully) in and out of hospital on account of an immune system that wasn’t up to scratch, he was also prone to accidents and had, ten years before retirement, gotten his leg caught in the proverbial gap between train and station in such a way that the locomotive whipped it clean off just below the knee and saved the surgeon a lot of trouble, which was what Southy himself had told me—“Should’ve got a discount; I did half the bastard’s work for him!”—when we first met on a cool autumn day at Essendon Airfield nearly twelve months before the original scheduled date of my time-travelling flight. The fact that Francis Southermore was not an aeronautical engineer—or an engineer of any sort, for that matter, his job at the National Rail having been that of a conductor for over forty years before he moved into administration, both occupations for which he was entirely apt given his painstaking attention to detail, an attention that at times bordered on pettiness, as for instance when he spent several months in my employ sourcing the exact aluminium sockets for the main frame and hinges for the ailerons of the Voisin biplane—this fact was of small concern to me; the blueprints were readily available from a contact of his at the Australian Vintage Aviation Society, which was soon to open a museum of its own, whose administrators initially expressed interest in joining forces to make my flight part of their opening celebrations, an idea I kiboshed immediately because their involvement was not part of Houdini’s first (really second) controlled flight at Diggers Rest, and I told them in no uncertain terms that my project was to be as authentic as possible, which meant no more or less than nine spectators below, including a journalist with pad and pencil and a photographer carting around a Kodak Brownie No. 2, all dressed in coats and hats in the fashion of 1910, and all prepared to sign a witness statement of fact that it was I, Arthur Bernard Cripp, Bernard to those who know me, who’d taken to the skies at 8.00am that morning and thus recreated the first (really second) controlled flight by a powered aircraft in Australia, right there at Diggers Rest, built as a stopping place for gold miners heading to Bendigo in search of their fortunes, a resting place, a place to pause, a place of hope that you could feel in the air, brim full, like the hope before a great journey, no wonder they’d later built the airport at nearby Tullamarine, the whole area tingles with hope and optimism, even awe—it’s truly bizarre there aren’t scores of people out there just gazing up at the miracle of jumbo jets, three hundred tonnes of steel and plastic capable of achieving an elevation of thirty thousand feet—and so while I agreed with the Australian Vintage Aviation Society that the wonders of air travel ought to be preserved and people encouraged to appreciate them, mine was not the event through which great masses might again look up in awe unless you happened to be one of the lucky nine, and only nine, to be in that paddock at 8.00am on that particular morning. Still, despite my reticence to publicise the event, the Society was very helpful and managed to send Southy the full specifications, pages of documents and equations and numbers and instructions based on the original design for the biplane by the renowned aeronautical engineer and manufacturer Gabriel Voisin, whose machines are known today as the first successful aircraft in Europe (despite a few counterclaims) and who was responsible for the Blériot II, III and IV as well as countless Voisins including the Voisin III through X, a WWI machine sold to the Russians and used for extensive bombing raids and exploratory missions, all of which Southy explained to me between long oohs and ahhs as he sat on an unused aircraft tyre in a hangar at Essendon Airfield while rubbing the stub below his knee, which had begun to ache on account of the vast amount of walking we’d done—he took great pleasure in massaging that truncated limb and seemed to do it out of habit rather than necessity—inspecting the various light aircraft and looking into flight school. No, it did not faze me that Southy was no more an aeronautical engineer than I—and I was certainly not of that persuasion, having been in and around circuses my entire life thanks to the fact that my father, Arthur Keith Cripp, owned one of the largest in the country and my mother, Marigold Cripp, neé Hobsbawm, helped to make it renowned through her performances as a celebrated contortionist, psychic and Australia’s first female illusionist—the fact of Southy’s never having built a machine for flying was, to me, merely a minor detail because not only was he the one person who could build me the biplane in the requisite timeframe and for the price I could afford—I ran a circus, not a bank—and not only did we get along very well from the start—he was the sort of bloke who’d talk to you as though you were his oldest friend, often starting as though picking up a previous conversation—but after meandering around Essendon Airfield—where we’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the tarmac looking up at the grey sky as several light planes circled above while he squinted, shielded his eyes from the glare, and squeezed the makes of each model from the corner of his mouth, Foxcon Terrier 200, Hummerchute, Jabiru J450—he then welcomed me into his charcoal-coloured Saab, a car he’d owned, so he said, since 1991, which had never missed a beat and was practically bulletproof—he’d fitted a hand throttle and used his uninjured left-foot for the brake—and took me to a large storage shed not far from the airfield, beige roller doors as far as the eye could see, his “home away from home,” so he said, where he “lived the life of a single man,” by which he meant making aircraft as opposed to anything untoward, for his shed was full of scale models of all different eras and sizes, some small enough to hold in your hand, others almost large enough to accommodate a pilot, painted in a variety of colours and made from a multitude of materials, there must have been fifty or so in there—forty-six, he told me—all in pristine condition and all parked according to make and model as though waiting to be taken onto the runway and up into the skies. Which was why I was not concerned that Francis Frank Southy Southermore was not an aeronautical engineer strictly speaking, given that he could recreate, from the technical drawings, an exact likeness of any aircraft—in fact, he told me he did not limit himself to such things; at home in his spare room (he and Janice had never had children) were all sorts of contraptions, trains and cars, military hardware including tanks, submarines and machine guns, and under the house, in what he called the rumpus room—I’ve always found people who live in suburban houses so odd—he had a model of the entire Melbourne CBD including the Yarra, which apparently took him almost a decade to complete, what with all his other projects, and which, he said with regret, would never be fully accurate given the changing nature of any city with buildings going up and coming down—an observation similarly put by my daughter, Beatrice, when we’d been driving through Melbourne and she’d asked me, “Dad, when will they be finished?” and I asked her, “When will they be finished what, darling?” and she’d pointed at the cranes overhead and said, “The city!” and I’d thought to myself at the time what cleverness there was in innocence—and it was something that clearly troubled Southy, too, for whenever he mentioned that particular model of the city his face arranged itself into an anguished expression as if a searing white light had abruptly emanated from the ground, or as if someone had begun to draw out one of his fingernails, and the fact that it still troubled him all these years on—he’d completed it almost fifteen years before we met—meant that the fact that he was not, strictly speaking, an aeronautical engineer did not trouble me in the slightest, especially standing there amid all those scaled-down aircraft he kept in storage near Tullamarine—there were some from the early twentieth century, though none with the boxtail I would require—where the smell of glue hung in the air, the light fizzed from overhead fluorescents, and those models seemed so real they might have fired up right then and there, ready for me, Prince of the Air, to climb aboard and take to the skies—which, of course, at that stage of my flying career, short though I knew it would be, I was in no position to take to the skies in anything because I would, over the ensuing months, need to learn how, beginning with the fundamentals of air travel, the theory, before moving on to practicalities and techniques, the facts, the laws, which in my most hesitant moments served to reassure me—ie., there are indisputable, objective truths that hold the aircraft aloft, and bring it down, so everything will be a-okay as long as we respect them—and it was on those facts, those laws, that I focused during my intense year of reading and watching clips of and interviews with various pilots who described how a machine could begin jostling about, leaning this way and that—banking—riding out air pockets and sudden gusts, described as bumps in the road, and it was to them that I looked when the voice inside me sought to point out that this particular road was not, in fact, made of earth or bitumen but rather air, an element that in most other situations, except perhaps breathing, can be ignored completely, written off as nothing at all. Through flying, I told myself, I would ascend to the world of the unseen, a world in which the invisible was paramount and required care, attention and respect, but first, before I became lost in dreamy asides, before I became all haughty and intoxicated on the poetry of flight, I needed to learn how to do it, and so you could say that, standing there in Southy’s “home away from home,” where he’d already started tinkering away at something over in that part of the shed that comprised his workshop, whistling a tune, surrounded by all those scale models, I myself was about as useless as every one of them, maybe even more useless; I myself was a scale model of a pilot at 1:1, a model of someone capable of climbing aboard and taking to the skies, someone who looked the part—by then I’d bought a bomber jacket and I’ve often been told I have a somewhat dashing “pilot” look, with the strong jaw and dreamy eyes, that windswept combination of manly capability and effete sensibility—though I was in truth someone who didn’t know a stick shaker from an actuator and would undoubtedly, if required to jump aboard and take command, immediately crash and burn. It’s bizarre to think that because of something someone did over a century ago—and not just any someone but the Great Houdini, Harry Weiss, Erik Weisz, Prince of the Skies, at enormous expense to another Harry, Harry Rickards, Henry Benjamin Leete, the great promotor, baritone and comedian, who’d brought the world-renowned escapologist out to Australia at the whopping-though-fitting sum of £200 a week, paid out from the day Houdini set foot on the boat in Europe to the day he set foot off it in Europe months later—it’s bizarre to think that because of all this, because Henry Benjamin Leete, born in Stratford, London, in 1843, to Benjamin Halls Leete, an Egyptian Rails engineer, and Mary Leete (née Watkins), became Harry Rickards (partly no doubt on account of his puritanical parents’ disapproval of his comic signing; they wanted him to be an engineer like his father) and had performed for, of all people, the Prince of Wales—who, as it happened, was Albert Edward at the time, the very same Albert Edward who would accede to the throne as Edward VII, the very same Edward VII who would, on his deathbed, receive news from his son, George Frederick Ernest Albert (by then himself the Prince of Wales), that his beloved horse, Witch of the Air, had won that day at Kempton Park, and reply, with his parting words, “Yes, I have heard of it. I am very glad”—so that that very same Albert Edward had with his own ears heard the baritone of Harry Rickards, had witnessed him on stage—the Prince’s response to which is not recorded—it’s bizarre to think that because Harry Rickards, born and bred an Englishman, had in 1871 travelled to Melbourne, Australia, of all places, and there found some success, as he had done in Sydney beforehand, and owing to money troubles had also toured America and South Africa before returning to the motherland where, particularly in villages and hamlets, he made his name as a “lion comique” and pantomime comedian, filling modest music halls and finding favour with “the provinces”—it’s bizarre to think that this is perhaps why, in 1885, he returned to Australia, a.k.a. the Antipodes, a word meaning literally “having the feet opposite,” presumably referring to the idea that those of us who dwell on the other side of the planet walk upside-down, and if that isn’t a description of “the provinces” I don’t know what is, Birmingham is one thing but Melbourne is altogether something else, and here he toured extensively with a vaudeville company to great acclaim, the Australians really loved him, and the feeling must have been mutual (and why wouldn’t it?—when you find a place that loves you you love it right back) because after several successful years in the Great Southern Land, entertaining the crowds in capital and regional cities, Rickards took the plunge and bought the Garrick Theatre on Sydney’s Castlereagh Street (a playhouse with a long history, even back then, of use as a vaudeville venue and had gone by various names including the Royal Marionette Theatre of Australia, the Royal Albert Theatre, Scandinavian Hall, Victoria Hall and the Academy of Music), changing its name to the Tivoli Theatre and opening its doors on 18 February 1893, until which point it had been officially closed for many years by the colonial architect at the time, kicking things off with the second run of Mr Harry Rickards and his New Tivoli Minstrel & Speciality Company, the first having been staged at the old Opera House in Sydney in 1892, a show that launched what became known as the Tivoli Circuit, an exceedingly popular touring company that managed to run for almost sixty years before being decimated by the advent of television in Australia in 1956, after which it lasted barely ten years because people were awestruck by the new machines they had in their very own living rooms, before which they sat and gazed in wonder at moving pictures to the catastrophic detriment of the once-beloved Tivoli Circuit which was, like the great actors of the silent age, left behind by the march of progress and technology, having only lately been a raging success under the astute command of promotor, proprietor, comedian and baritone Harry Rickards, featuring ventriloquists, comedians, acrobats, trapeze artists, dancers and singers, travelling to Tivoli Theatres around the country including those in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth—as I write this only one remains: Her Majesty’s in Adelaide—and having boasted, some ten years after that first show at the old Opera House in Sydney, almost one thousand employees, all under the astute command of Harry Rickards whose puritanical parents would have been turning in their graves to know that their son had nicked off from the motherland to tour the provinces with a bunch of circus people—wearing a coat and hat, it’s true, but also, when the mood took him, an enormous black tulle skirt that started somewhere up around his chest and brushed the boards like a fog on the banks of the Thames, these being the clothes of a man dressed for success and madness simultaneously who created an empire of his own, an empire large enough to attract the likes of Marie Lloyd, Peggy Pryde, Paul Cinquevalli, and Little Tich, not to mention the Great Houdini who would, on 18 March 1910, at enormous expense to Rickards, climb aboard his Voisin biplane and unleash a chain of events that would lead me, Arthur Bernard Cripp, to stand in that enormous shed near Tullamarine Airport over a century later and walk among those replica scale-model airplanes while their mastermind (though not technically an aeronautical engineer) whistled a tune at his workbench. To date, so Southy told me that afternoon, the largest replica he had built was—and he indicated with a kick of his prosthetic leg in the direction of the model in question—a 1:3 scale version of a 1915 German-designed Fokker E.III Eindecker fighter (actually, Fokker was Dutch but studied and worked in Germany), complete with Belgian linen covering, sourced from the same family business that had once supplied materials for the original run of two hundred and forty-nine aircraft—“The world’s first real fighter,” Southy said between melodies—which saw the hitherto wooden fuselage of machines such as Houdini’s Voisin replaced with steel and a Fokker-Leimberger Gatling gun, capable of delivering over seven thousand rounds per minute, which was mounted in front of the pilot and which, via some very clever engineering, fired through the propeller blades, meaning that for accuracy the pilot had to aim the plane at his target, not just the gun, the implication being of course that the entire aircraft became the weapon, a machine of death, the firearm was merely the tip of the iceberg because what made the Gatling gun so effective was the aircraft’s manoeuvrability with its steel fuselage, its wing warping for roll, its full-flying stab for pitch: it was an overall package which, in the hands of the right person, could wreak havoc on the enemy, and did, thanks to one Max Immelmann—who is often credited, mistakenly, as scoring the first aerial victory using a synchronised gun; a feat actually performed by fellow German ace Kurt Wintgens in a Fokker MK.5 (predecessor to the E.III) who in a subsequent letter said of the encounter: “I attacked at such a close distance that we looked each other into the face”—but it was Max Immelmann who, although beaten to the punch for the first shootdown, perfected the art of aerial combat to such a degree that his technique was immortalised in the adoption and dissemination of the Immelmann turn, a manoeuvre whereby the pilot flirts with the very limits of the machine’s capabilities, spinning it around on the verge of a stall in order to swoop down on enemy aircraft multiple times over, a technique still in use today (though one I’d never dare attempt) if not in military aviation then certainly in aerobatics and air shows, and really it’s the least the history books could do for the ill-fated German ace, for not only was he second to the first shootdown, he was also the second pilot to achieve the coveted six victories (here beaten to the punch by one Oswald Boelcke), which rendered him the second to receive the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern for the feat; but the eternal bridesmaid Immelmann would eventually tie the knot on 18 June 1916 when, after a (contested) seventeen victories, he was gunned down while flying over Lens in northern France by British second lieutenant G.R. McCubbin who, as (bad) luck would have it, opened fire just as Immelmann was executing another of his famous turns, whereon his damaged machine plunged to earth from a height of two thousand feet, making the pioneer ace the first of the three stars of the German skies to be killed in battle—the other two being, of course, Kurt Wintgens (died 25 September 1916) and Oswald Boelcke (died 28 October 1916)—while flying (in Immelmann’s and Wintgens’ cases) this very aircraft, this aircraft that Southy, while whistling, pointed at with his prosthesis in that storage shed at Tullamarine, not far from Diggers Rest. Of course, the E.III that I then wandered over to inspect, touching the wings of the others as I passed, was not precisely the same as those in which the German aces took their final plunges, for it was scaled down by a ratio of 1:3 and therefore, despite the necessarily diminutive stature of those early pilots, unable to accommodate anything other than a toddler or a little person—to whom, thanks to my line of work, now that Dad is in the final stage of dementia, I do have access (a little person, that is, not a toddler): namely, one Vasily Cosgrove, enormously talented performer, Cripp’s Circus undefeated chess champion, towering intellect, formidable arm wrestler and expert drunk. If there was anyone who helped me through those difficult months and years following the disappearance of that Boeing 777-200ER from the skies somewhere over Asia, together with all two hundred and thirty-nine souls onboard, including my wife Alison and daughter Beatrice, it was Vazo the Terrible (his stage name both lending gravitas to his performance and nodding to his Russian roots) who offered no platitudes or clichés—being at odds with the bulk of the population means you tend to avoid clichés—and ensured a steady supply of inexpensive champagne, the circus being fully booked and constantly on the move, and who had me drive the both of us in my father’s beloved opalescent maroon Jaguar XJ6 into the desert, once a week, so that we could scream at the stars till our eyes burst. I could easily have asked Vazo out to Southy’s shed, had him climb into that scale-model E.III and sent him up at 8.00am on 18 March to complete a full circle of the paddock and recreate the second ever controlled flight of a powered aircraft over Australian soil, and undoubtedly Vazo the Terrible would have leapt at the opportunity, because not only was he exceedingly clever and physically powerful but he was also always on the lookout for new and increasingly devilish feats—much like the great escapologist himself—and yet it would not have been an authentic recreation, for on that crisp early morning in 1910 it was not after all a midget who clambered aboard a 1:3 scale model of a Dutch-German Fokker E.III Eindecker (not least because the E.III wasn’t produced until 1915) but rather a 1:1 life-size original of the famous illusionist, stunt performer, vaudeville actor, businessman, scourge of fake spiritualists, Hungarian-born American Harry Houdini, Erik Weisz, Ehrich Weiss, or Harry Weiss, who clambered aboard the 1:1 French-designed Voisin bi-plane he’d shipped to Australia—having just flown the same aircraft in Hamburg (and reportedly paid USD $5,000 for it) and now prepared to fly again on a retainer from Rickards of £200 per week (something to the tune of £24,000 in today’s money, which alas I was unable to recreate!) from the moment he hopped on the ship in Europe to the moment he hopped off upon his return—and at 8.00am precisely took to the skies for something like a minute at a height of around one hundred feet above the old Plumpton paddock, with nine spectators, including a journalist with pad and paper and a photographer toting a Kodak Brownie No.2, looking to the heavens, and two disinterested horses looking down at the more appealing grass—another detail I wished to co-ordinate—which meant that to ask my esteemed friend Vazo the Terrible to jump into the already-built 1:3 scale model of the Fokker E.III would have been much the same as not performing the feat at all; the details would have been all wrong, the facts discarded, for it was an exercise in detail and fact, and if there was ever a time to stick to the facts it was in recreating history and taking to the skies: in both instances, you disregarded facts at your peril. And so in order to recreate Houdini’s remarkable feat—that is, to be the first person to successfully and fully (there had been attempts before, minor ones) recreate the first (but really second) controlled flight of a powered aircraft above Australian soil, and in so doing to recreate exactly the image that appeared on page nine of The Argus on Monday, 21 March 1910, for that was the image seared into my mind,
