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Lainie Anderson onÌýLong Flight Home

This year marks the centenary of the 1919 Great Air Race, the world’s first flight from England to Australia – an achievement akin to landing a man on the moon. With only a compass for navigation, Sir Ross Smith (with co-pilot, navigator and brother Keith Smith, and mechanics Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett ) flew an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy aircraft – made of wood, fabric, and wire – nearly 18,000 kilometers across the world.

Lainie Anderson is South Australia’s epic flight Centenary Ambassador. OverÌýthe past ten years, Lainie has campaigned to preserve the plane languishing out of sight at Adelaide Airport, and raise the profile of the 1919 flight. She received a prestigious Churchill fellowship to travel the world, tracing the epic flight route, and speaking to international aviation historians. Ìý

, published by Wakefield Press, uses war diaries, letters, and her Churchill fellowship research conducted along the race route, to create this factional account of the flight through the drama of Wally Shiers.ÌýShiers had promised, if he survived the Great War, to marry Helena Alford, but he couldn’t resist joining the heroic flight and the danger it posed to their future. ÌýComprehensive notes reference the research and show where fact and fictions have been interwoven.

Lainie AndersonÌýhas been a weekly columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail since 2007, and previously worked at the Herald Sun in Melbourne, and the Times in London.
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WHENÌýWednesday 20 November,Ìý6 for a 6.30pm start.

WHEREÌýIra Raymond Exhibition Room, Barr Smith Library, ³ÉÈË´óƬ.

ENTRYÌý$10 at the door. Students free.

BOOKINGSÌýPlease RSVPÌýby 18 November toÌýfriends_library@adelaide.edu.au,Ìýor phone 8313 6356.