Lores Rubens returned home fluent in German and French and an accomplished pianist. But beneath the veneer of conformity there still lurked a young woman waiting to challenge the traditional female role long before liberation became a household word.

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In 1917, while working for the Red Cross, Lores met and married Harry Bonney, a wealthy Brisbane, Australia, leather goods manufacturer. After that, Lores appeared to be settling into the luxurious life of Brisbane society. But the marriage produced no children, and Lores later recalled that she was bored to distraction until her 1928 flight with Bert Hinkler opened a new window.

Fearing Harry’s disapproval, Lores Bonney learned to fly in secret while her husband spent his weekends on the local golf course. Unable to drive a car, she hitched early morning rides with her milkman to nearby Eagle Farm airport, where she took clandestine lessons in a de Havilland DH-60G Gipsy Moth biplane.

Harry eventually found out about the lessons, but he proved to be more supportive than she had anticipated. When she was awarded her pilot’s license in 1931, he presented her with a pair of custom-made leather flying suits and her own DH-60G Gipsy Moth, which she named My Little Ship. To celebrate, she set an Australian long-distance record, flying 947 miles in one day on her first solo cross-country flight — quite a feat in an aircraft that cruised at around 80 mph.

Harry Bonney’s supportive attitude was rare at a time when men — and most women — believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Nowhere was male chauvinism more evident than in aviation. Lores Bonney got a taste of what most male aviators thought of women fliers in 1932, shortly after becoming the first Australian woman to gain a commercial pilot’s license.

Preparing to make a flight around Australia — the first by a woman — she approached Australia’s transpacific hero Charles Kingsford Smith, who had achieved prominence by making the same flight in 1927. Kingsford Smith declined to offer any advice to her. He dismissed her plan, saying, ‘You might make it if you’ve got the guts.’ Forty-five years later when I interviewed her, I could still sense Bonney’s anger as she recalled that encounter. ‘Can you imagine it?’ she asked me. ‘That’s all Smithy could to say to me.’

After she set out on her 8,200-mile around-Australia flight on August 15, 1932, Lores was again confronted by chauvinism when she landed for fuel at a remote outback cattle station. She recalled: ‘I was met by two bush cockies [ranchers] complete with grass stalks hanging from their mouths. They slowly looked me up and down, and one drawled ‘Yer know mate, can’t be much to this flying business, if a woman can do it.’ I gave him a pitying smile.’

She completed the flight in 95 hours of flying time spread over six weeks. After that accomplishment Bonney was dubbed ‘the never-give-up-airwoman’ by the press because during the flight she had had to overcome a landing gear collapse on a makeshift outback airstrip, a wing spar that fractured in turbulence, and a forced landing caused by a piston’s disintegrating. On her final leg home, a carelessly flown plane — in which a photographer was trying to record her flight — crash-landed with a mangled tail fin after colliding with Bonney’s Moth. But the determined Bonney managed to carry on despite a wingtip damaged in the collision. That marathon flight won her the Qantas Trophy for ‘the most meritorious performance by an Australian pilot during 1932.’

When she flew to England in 1933, the public failed to recognize the immensity of her achievement. She had no radio and only sketchy maps, and she performed her own maintenance along the way. Airfields and repair facilities were few and far apart, and there were no navigation aids. In preparation for the flight, Bonney spent months working as an unofficial apprentice in the Qantas maintenance hangar, learning how to overhaul her Moth and its engine.

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