Qantas Rising Book

Qantas Rising is in part the story of two young ex-servicemen Paul McGuinness and Hudson Fysh who founded what was to become one of the world’s great airlines-QANTAS.

Sir Hudson Fysh’s own career was inseparable from that of Qantas. So we first have his boyhood in Tasmania; then his service with the Light Horse at Gallipolli and in Palestine; then his services as a wartime observer and pilot, a period enlivened both by the enemy and by the unpredictability of the aircraft of the time.

Then, on his return to Australia, there is the epic journey by T Model Ford across the deserts and creeks of Western Queensland and the Northern Territory in search of suitable landing sites for Ross Smith who was about to make his historic first flight from England to Australia; and then, once more in the air himself, after Qantas had been founded, barnstorming around outback Queensland to keep the infant company solvent. This is the Qantas story from 1919 to 1934.