Abstract
In late December 1937, New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, played host to a unique aeronautical confluence. On December 26, after 31 hours flying, the Pan American Airways’ (PAA) flying boat Samoan Clipper touched down on the Waitemata Harbour. The Samoan Clipper’s arrival from Honolulu into Auckland marked a much hoped-for inauguration of a commercial service carrying cargo and mail from San Francisco to Auckland. The following day, as the Samoan Clipper lay moored at Mechanics’ Bay, the Imperial Airways flying boat Centaurus, on the last leg of a survey flight from Southampton, arrived from Sydney. Both flying boat crews were fêted by local dignitaries (see Figure 12.1). Reflecting on the event, the editor of Auckland’s morning newspaper The New Zealand Herald prophesied a rosy aeronautical future, one of advantage “not only to New Zealand but also to Australia, more particularly when the Empire route is continued across the Tasman.”1 However, amid the celebrations there were quiet reminders of the ongoing political and technical difficulties in establishing and maintaining links across the Pacific and to the United Kingdom. PAA’s representative F. Walton had earlier hinted that broader geopolitical issues were at stake.2 Geopolitics aside, the very act of regular oceanic flight required the fashioning of a still fragile techno-scientific infrastructure. In this context, the importance of meteorological information was stressed by J. W. Burgess, the New Zealand-born captain of the Centaurus.
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Donald Denoon and Phillipa Mein-Smith, with Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford and Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
Phillippa Mein-Smith and Peter Hempenstall, “Rediscovering the Tasman World,” in Remaking the Tasman World (Christchurch, Canterbury University Press, 2008), 13–30.
Donald Denoon, “Re-membering Australasia: A Repressed Memory,” Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 122 (2003): 290–304.
See: David Butler, “Technogeopolitics and the Struggle for Control of World Air Routes, 1910–1928,” Political Geography 20 (2001): 635–58;
Marc Dierikx, “Struggle for Prominence: Clashing Dutch and British Interests on the Colonial Air Routes 1918–42,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991): 333–51;
Gordon Pirie, Air Empire: British Imperial Aviation, 1919–39 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009).
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Liz Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
Simon Naylor, “Nationalizing Provincial Weather: Meteorology in Nineteenth-Century Cornwall,” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 407–33.
In the context of this paper relevant “national” histories include: C. Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press2008);
J. F. de Lisle, Sails to Satellites: A History of Meteorology in New Zealand (Wellington: New Zealand Meteorological Service, 1986);
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Jean Heffer, The United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier, trans. W. Donald Wilson (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: The Penguin Press, 2001);
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Barrie MacDonald, Massey’s Imperialism and the Politics of Phosphate (Palmerston North: Massey University, 1982).
Robert W. D. Boyce, “Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879–1902,” The English Historical Review 115, no. 460 (2000): 39–70;
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Kosmas Tsokhas, “Cartels, Imperial Relations and Australian Shipping Policy in the Asia-Pacific Region, 1914–1939,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 27, no. 3 (1997): 356–73.
J. G. Coates, “Memorandum on Proposal of Pan-American Airways to Institute an Aviation Service between the United States and New Zealand,” September 20, 1935, PM 26, Part 1 Wellington: Archives New Zealand. The quote comes from the notes of a meeting between the Minister of Finance, Gordon Coates and Gatty, 3.
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Stuart Banner, Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Matthew Henry, “Trans-Tasman Meteorology and the Production of a Tasman Airspace, 1920–1940,” Environment and Nature in New Zealand 4, no. 1 (2009): 14–36.
“Kingsford Smith and Ulm to Kidson,” September 17, 1928, ABLO 8/9/5/1, Wellington: Archives New Zealand. Their weather observations throughout the flight were later published in: Edward Kidson, “Meteorological Conditions During the First Flight Across the Tasman Sea,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 55 (1929): 53–54.
Edward Kidson, “The Co-Ordination of Meteorological Services in the Islands of the Pacific,” in Proceedings of the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, Australia 1923, ed. Gerald Lightfoot (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1923): 639–45 (quote, 645).
Ibid., 6. This concern was manifested in the “Four Colonels Revolt” in May 1938 that was sparked by the reorganization of the army, and which ironically saw an increased emphasis on the air force, see: L. H Barber, “The New Zealand Colonels’ ‘Revolt’, 1938,” New Zealand Law Journal 6 (December 1977): 496–502.
John de Lisle, Sails to Satellites: A History of Meteorology in New Zealand (Wellington: New Zealand Meteorological Service, 1986).
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Henry, M. (2014). Australasian Airspace: Meteorology, and the Practical Geopolitics of Australasian Airspace, 1935–1940. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_13
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