Grantlee Kieza - Hudson Fysh

Fysh is met by his wife Nell and children John and Wendy at Archerfield Aerodrome in Brisbane after a flying visit to London on behalf of Qantas in 1937. State Library of NSW FL520053

Hudson Fysh was a very determined man. He was very shy in those early days, but he was a man of courage and determination, and he had good vision... this vision of service to the public which he was determined to carry through.

J OHN F YSH , H UDSONS SON

I T WAS A CLEAR, CRISP day beside the serpentine Brisbane River in 1971 as Sir Wilmot Hudson Fysh, strode purposefully towards the corner of Creek and Adelaide streets. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, the still spritely seventy-six year old was walking along a path he had trodden more than fifty years earlier, long before his hair had turned white and he had developed the need for thick black-framed glasses, and long before he and his aeroplanes had conquered time and distance to make Australia one with the outside world.

This tall, lean and unassuming colossus of the aviation world turned left, then walked through a wooden door with a frosted glass sign that in gold script proclaimed Gresham Hotel. With its colonial architecture and iron lacework, the Gresham had been a landmark in the Queensland capital for almost a hundred years, and it was the site where an Australian icon was born.

Fysh took his place in a chair at a wooden table in the middle of the famous old pubs smoking lounge and, looking down the barrel of an Australian Broadcasting Commission camera, he began to outline in clipped, modulated tones the story of the airline Qantas and how it had come to life in that very room. He told the documentary makers about how he had survived the horrors of Gallipoli and aerial combat over Palestine, and how the little bush airline he and his friends had launched in 1920 had grown into an international powerhouse that was the envy of airlines around the globe.

By 1971 Fysh was a retired business giant who spent most of his time playing with his grandchildren, hitting the fairways and wading through trout streams. But when he had first visited the Gresham in 1920, he had been a novice pilot and the nervous sidekick to his mercurial pal Paul Ginty McGinness, with their sales pitch. They asked him to help finance a small business running a couple of cheap aircraft in the outback that could service remote sheep and cattle stations as aerial taxis. McGinness and Fysh could also fly around the western parts of Queensland and into the Northern Territory, looking for the best paddock to put down and asking local squatters if theyd like to pay for a joy ride. Very few people in the outback had seen an aeroplane, and even fewer had flown in one. That day in the Greshams smoking lounge, all three men knew there would likely be years of struggle ahead for their little venture.

The devil-may-care McGinness was champing at the bit for a challenge, but like most of the adventurous fighter pilots who tried aviation careers after the Great War, he did not have the temperament for the day-to-day order and stresses of business life. Fysh was different: calm, quiet and methodical, he spent ten years living in western Queensland, where his two adored children were born and where, in the heat and dust, he steered the infant Qantas through turbulent times.

The first aircraft Fysh flew for Qantas cost 450 and carried one nervous passenger in an open cockpit. Under his stewardship for almost half a century, the airline grew into a company that in 1967 paid $123 million and would make global travel affordable and accessible for future generations of Australians. By 1971, when Fysh revisited the Gresham, Qantas had come to embody the spirit of Australia, with its symbol of the flying kangaroo, and it set the benchmark for service and safety around the globe.

Born in Tasmania in the age of the horse and cart, Fysh saw them overtaken by the motor car. He started his working life as a farmhand and jackaroo, then survived Australias baptism of fire on Gallipoli. He came through aerial combat in dogfights with German aces, delivered secret messages for Lawrence of Arabia, and became an old man in the age of heart transplants and trips to the moon. Along the way he transformed from a shy, awkward teenager into a war hero and titan of Australian business. Never motivated by money or fame, but rather by what was good for his country, Fysh was at the heart of it a simple, humble man who lived in rented accommodation for most of his life, rarely owned a car, and was known as Hud or Huddy to his family and friends.

Because of his efforts at the controls of Qantas, Fysh lived his final years at a time when Australians routinely flew on his airlines machines to the furthest corners of the globe in a single day. Few apart from Fysh could have foreseen the airlines ultimate success from its humble beginnings.

Henry Reed was a good man. He loved God and good work and good people. His sympathies went out specially to the poor and friendless; and to be the means of ministering to their temporal and spiritual welfare was for many years the joy of his life.