Lores Bonney: Australian Female Pilot

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Australian airwoman Lores Bonney’s fiercely independent spirit catapulted her into a series of flying adventures during aviation’s golden age that made the Perils of Pauline seem tame. While Hollywood heroine Pauline White frequently faced death on celluloid, the diminutive Australian airwoman’s whizz-bang escapades were real. She became the first woman to circumnavigate Australia’s daunting wilderness in 1932 and to pioneer the eastbound, headwind-bucking Australia–England flight in 1933. Bonney’s greatest endeavor, in 1937, saw her become the first pilot, man or woman, to make the epic 18,200-mile flight from Australia across Asia and down the gut of Africa to Cape Town.

Bonney’s life was crammed with challenge and achievement. In America her name was placed on the wall of the Flyer’s Chapel at California’s St. Francis Atrio Mission alongside the names of icons such as Charles Lindbergh, Charles Kingsford Smith and Amelia Earhart. Since 1933, British aviation has regularly awarded the Bonney Trophy to a deserving woman pilot. The international women’s service organization Zonta, which counts Earhart among its founding members, made Bonney a life member. And shortly before Bonney’s death in 1994 at age 96, Australia’s prestigious Griffiths University awarded her a doctorate for her service to aviation. Yet for the most part this remarkable woman remains a forgotten figure in aviation history.

I was fortunate to know her. She was approaching 80 when we completed a series of interviews that led to the publication of her biography. I remember one afternoon when we talked on the veranda of her cliff-top home on Queensland’s Gold Coast. An octogenarian fashion plate, wearing high heels that would have dismayed a woman 50 years her junior, Lores tucked a wayward wisp of hair into her silk bandanna as she poured afternoon tea from an exquisite Victorian silver pot. Looking at her that day, it was easy to understand why 1930s journalists nicknamed her ‘the airwoman of style.’ More difficult to comprehend is why they were unable to grasp the significance of her flights and concentrated on her appearance rather than her performance in the cockpit. Airwomen faced the same dangers and had to have just as much courage as their male counterparts — something the press and the public often lost sight of when it came to women aviators.

Looking up to watch a Tiger Moth biplane pass overhead in the afternoon sky during one of my interviews with her, Lores was misty-eyed. ‘Oh, how it takes me back,’ she mused. For her, ‘back’ was aviation’s adventuring years — when Lindbergh, Kingsford Smith, Earhart and the other golden age greats were making headlines. One of them, Australia’s Lone Eagle Bert Hinkler, was Bonney’s husband’s cousin. Fresh from his pioneering 1928 England–Australia solo flight, Hinkler took Lores for her first flight. Recalling her sensations as they wheeled over Brisbane in his Avro Avian biplane, she told me: ‘It was the answer to my dreams. I adored birds, and there I was literally feeling like one. There and then I decided then to become a pilot.’

Lores was born Maude Rubens in South Africa in 1897. She told me that she hated her given name, adding,’so I adopted the name Lores.’ Her family emigrated to Australia in 1906. As a teenager, she loved the piano but had no interest in formal schooling and defied all attempts to discipline her. ‘To put it bluntly,’ she said, ‘I was a rebel.’ Hoping to curb her rebelliousness and further her classical piano training, her parents sent her to a’spit and polish’ finishing school in Germany. It seemed ideal training for her perceived role as the wife of a successful businessman, who would be expected to direct servants, run a home and be a perfect hostess.

Shortly before World War I, after giving a private recital for Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister, Lores played in a concert before Frankfurt’s society. The glittering occasion was too much for the 16-year-old’s nerves. ‘I neither liked the situation nor the sea of faces,’ she recalled. ‘So I feigned a nosebleed and fled from the stage.’ It was her first and last concert performance.

Tags: Adventurers & Trail Blazers, Aviation History, Women's History

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