Sir Charles Kingsford Smith

Sir Charles Kingsford Smith — the most internationally famous Australian of the inter-war years — kept a Darling Point address on Greenoaks Avenue at the height of his career. He had crossed the Pacific in 1928, the first man ever to do so by aircraft, and the peninsula was where he came home to live.

Charles Edward Kingsford Smith was born in Brisbane in 1897 and trained as an engineer before enlisting, in 1915, with the Australian Imperial Force. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, won the Military Cross for action over the Western Front, and emerged from the First World War as one of the small number of Australians who had flown in combat. The decade between 1919 and 1928 he spent partly as a barnstorming and commercial pilot in California, partly in failed attempts to raise the funds for the long crossings he intended to make. The 1928 trans-Pacific flight was the breakthrough.

The crossing of the Pacific

Between 31 May and 9 June 1928, Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot Charles Ulm, with two American crew, flew the Fokker F.VII Southern Cross from Oakland, California to Brisbane via Honolulu and Suva. It was the first crossing of the Pacific by aircraft of any nationality. The total flight time was eighty-three hours over the water, in a tri-motor aircraft of the period — a feat of navigation, endurance and engineering for which there was no precedent.

He returned to Sydney a national figure. In the seven years that followed he set a sequence of long-distance records — the first westward crossing of the Pacific (1934), the first non-stop crossing of the Australian continent, multiple England-to-Australia records — and was knighted in 1932 in the Birthday Honours. By the early 1930s, when he was living on Greenoaks Avenue in Darling Point, he was the most recognisable Australian in the world.

The disappearance

On the night of 7–8 November 1935, Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge took off from Allahabad in the Lady Southern Cross, a Lockheed Altair, intending to fly to Singapore on a record attempt for the England-to-Australia run. Neither the aircraft nor the men were ever seen again. The accepted reconstruction is that the Altair came down in the Andaman Sea, off the coast of Burma, in the early hours of 8 November. Almost two years later, in May 1937, the undercarriage leg of an aircraft was washed up at Aye Island in the Gulf of Martaban, and was confirmed by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to be from the Lady Southern Cross. No other physical evidence of the men, or of the aeroplane, has ever been recovered.

The peninsula's most famous tenant

Kingsford Smith's Darling Point years were brief — three or four years in the early 1930s, between the Pacific crossing and the disappearance — and the public record of them is thin, in keeping with the peninsula's ordinary pattern. Of all the figures who have lived on Yarranabbe and Greenoaks Avenue across the past two centuries, he is the one whose international standing was greatest at the moment of his residence; and the one whose departure was most abrupt. The peninsula does not advertise the connection.