STINSON CRASH REMEMBERED

A gruelling mountain trek pays homage to the victims of a tragic air crash and honours its heroes

- DENISE CULLEN

IT WAS 3AM and raining steadily as I laced up my battered hiking boots on a morning last May in Lamington National Park, a vast south-east Queensland wilderness about 110km by road south of Brisbane. I was at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat – formerly O’Reilly’s Guest House – preparing to connect with a visceral piece of Australian history that began just after 1pm on 19 February 1937. That was when an Airlines of Australia Stinson Model A airliner carrying two pilots and five passengers left Brisbane’s Archerfield aerodrome bound for Sydney. It never arrived at its destination.

After extensive air, land and sea searches failed to find any trace of the plane, most people concluded it had crashed into the ocean. But Bernard O’Reilly, of the eponymous family that opened the famed guesthouse, thought differently. There was, he recalls in his 1940 book Green Mountains, a ferocious cyclone on the day the Stinson went missing and he’d spoken to several people, including his brother, who’d seen it flying towards the cloud-shrouded McPherson Range. “The answer was lying somewhere…amid eighty thousand acres of unbroken, trackless jungle,” he wrote.

Using a topographic map, pencil and foot rule, Bernard, then aged 33, drew a line from the plane’s last sighting, along the expected line of flight to Lismore, which crossed four high mountain ranges. He figured the missing plane had to be on the northern slopes of one of them, and he was going to find it.